(no subject)

goal for the summer? pull the shambles that pass as my life back together.

i feel like i've been slipping back to the old me, the right-after-college me, the apathetic me. the world is sort of prancing along around me, without me, and i sit here twiddling my thumbs and waiting for lightning to strike. it's not striking, and i need to make it strike.

maybe my job this summer will help me do that; putting myself on a regular schedule is good at forcing me to care. classes aren't regular enough...when i had classes and trial both going simultaneously, that was, but when trial team ended i just fell apart. i lost it again.

maybe when my grades come out, that will help me pull myself together again. they're going to be low, extremely low, because for all the caring and hard work i put in last semester, i successfully threw it all away this semester...and that's too bad. i should not have let myself do that, but i did.

and now i'm reduced again to staring out into space. i want to write creatively again, because it makes me feel grounded, but i'm afraid that what i write is going to be bad, or just not profound enough that anyone's going to care. i'd say i'm turning into stephen dedalus, in his dilemma, but that would imply that there's something Greater about how stuck i'm feeling. there's not.

so, basically, i need to reconcile my insignificance with my need to get off my tail and do something about my life. it's quite the impossible task.

who wants to be a crackhead?

i'm thinking of someone who really needs to Stop Smoking Crack.
it's this guy. he's on who wants to be a millionaire. he's at the $300 question. he proceeds to use all of his lifelines...oh, just watch the darn clip. it's hysterical.

something real, something dead.

i want to write about what i've been looking at this afternoon, but the words aren't coming. i've been looking at pictures of desolation...abandoned amusement parks in particular, and abandoned places in general. i still can't pinpoint why i just keep looking and looking and looking...they're places i've never been, they're places i'll probably never go, but they're probably all places that, if i went there, i could successfully drop off the face of the earth. that's somewhat scary, somewhat comforting, and just what i need right now.

i found this series of photos especially riveting...probably because it's so extensive. the concept of an abandoned amusement park just makes me sad. they're places where people are supposed to go to be happy--and it confuses me why people would stop going to them, why they would have to fall into disrepair. i could draw so many bad comparisons to the loss of childhood or innocence or anything like that, but i know it's probably something more mundane, like poor management or economic recession. either way...after looking at all of these pictures, i just want to hop the next bus to arkansas, find this land, and mourn this amusement park that i never knew existed until today.

whoohoo!

*looks at metro website*
*blinks*
*looks at metro website again*
*blinks again*

holy moly! they have a trip planner feature now!

SQUEE!!!!!

whisky tango foxtrot

i'm a little disturbed right now. there is, or was, a rather disturbed livejournaler somewhere in the madina lake/blank theory fandom. (in other news, there's a madina lake/blank theory fandom?) even though it's a long-abandoned community, i'm disturbed that someone started a livejournal community themed around matthew/nathan incest fanfic.

bandmates? i'm not into the fanfic world, but that sounds pretty normal...i'm not bothered by the concept of bandmate slash. i'm sure there's plenty of that floating around everywhere. but...these particular bandmates are twin brothers. i find twin fetishes, just like any other incest fetishes, personally disturbing, especially they involve people i know of...and, in this case, people i have met in real life.

people are weird.

what am i about to do?

tomorrow morning, i'm doing something i haven't done in years. it's something that's so Not Me that i'm almost ashamed to be admitting that i'm doing it, but it's something i've been curious about for so long, that i want to just step out and do it...and tomorrow i am.

i'm going to church.

since i lived in chicago, i've been batting around the idea of going to a unitarian universalist service, just to see what it is like. i've read a bunch of stuff about it on the net over the last year and a half, maybe two years, just on and off...i'm intrigued by the idea of a religious, yet non-creedal, community. i'm still not quite sure how it works, but i like the idea of there being a group of people to talk faith with, a regular community of devotion and centering, without a rigid set of beliefs.

why now? why tomorrow instead of a year or two ago, or a year or two from now, or never? i really don't know. i haven't had any sort of epiphany, any sort of finger of God or anyone else pushing me, nudging me, telling me that i need to go. it's more like...i've had this curiosity in the back of my mind for a while, i've got this weekend on my own, going to a service instead of reading about it on the internet for the umpteenth time would be a productive and possibly enriching thing for me to do.

the reason i'm almost ashamed to admit that i'm going to a service is that i'm so against organized religion. i still haven't quite decided where unitarian universalism fits in as being organized religion or not, under my conception of it. from what i've read, i'm open to possibly saying no...because even though there are ministers and services and structures, there doesn't seem to be One Book, or One Prophet, or even one way of conceptualizing God. my biggest reservation about organized religion is the feeling of a flock mentality...the fundamentalist substitution of church teaching for independent thought, the old relic from those visits to high school bible study. from what i know about unitarian universalism, i don't get the feeling that there's such a substitution there, or a desire for people to make that substitution.

i still have a lot of questions, i still don't know what, if anything, this curiosity will lead to. but, as it stands, i'm going to a service tomorrow. we'll see what happens.