scribbleagain

[scribbleagain]

To be cold

To be cold to be warm to be sad to feel the sun this is what it means to be here

we do not get to choose every moment or what they mean in the end or how we’ll count the time we spent

will we have changed things will it be colder and warmer through you when you leave- a little sadder while you were here- a little brighter and will we remember why

[scribbleagain]

2/22/24

It is nearing the end of the work week of my latest attempt at consistency. This is my first journal to commend an attempt to change for the better. I bought a planner. the word "planner" seems strange and old. I can feel the sweater vest, smell the steam coming from a hot iron, and hear the crisp creases on a button down on it. an agenda book. that's what it is. like the good old days with the holographic covers that bobbed and weaved when you would tilt it to and fro. Anyway I love it. I like taking a pencil and scratching off every item. (I will soon do so again after finishing this newest addition to my agenda book). I haven't journaled in years. I don't know when I last did so in a serious way. It'll probably be better today because of the time that has passed since my last one.

or maybe worse.

the phone could have kept an agenda. I've actually done it before. but crossing something off with my pencil is a different feeling of accomplishment than tip tapping away on a screen. it's not the simple action. the phone is conflated. I do too many other things on it. Life used to be more sectioned off. one thing - one responsibility. I think when the phone started doing one more thing it was the beginning of the end. colors on my screen. it would blink from the default green to an orange and a red and a blue and whatever other colors. why. why did it need to take another step forward. because after that and texting with a full keyboard. and then taking pictures. we all fell apart in some way didn't we? people i mean. I think I did. it was all just too much happening in the palm of your hand. that eventually you couldn't remember anymore what it is you really wanted to do in the first place.

but this agenda book. silly little book. only has one job. to remember what i said i needed to do. and to do it and it rewards me the satisfaction of crossing it out. like homework in gradeschool.

I wake up in the morning, groggy as all hell but at a particular time now. because I wrote down that i said I would. and dare i let my day start by being unable to cross out an item on my agenda! the horror, what would that mean for the rest of my day. It let's me take my dog for a walk. do a few arm curls and shoulder presses. such a silly simple thing. writing and crossing things out.

I was watching a show "this is us" for the first time these past few weeks. ah it started in a really uncomfortable place for me for some reason. I figured out it was because I wasn't watching this show to relax or have fun. I was watching it to get mentorship. as soon as i came to terms with that the discomfort faded.

I was watching my role models in these fictional characters. living in ways that I wanted to live. but never saw before.

no one's perfect. but i think most of us try to be our best. but sometimes we need to have role models show us how.

I guess I never had that. and I guess it's a weird and new feeling to finally learn.

If I'm a dad one day, I want to be a good dad. I know I won't be perfect. Same with being a husband. a friend. a brother. but i'll try and it's good to have some ideas and examples of what that looks like.

I've also started reading godel escher bach. What a fun and challenging read. but even before talking about the book. What a discipline it is to sit down and read a book every day. to be present for each word. and to allow yourself to be taken down a path in your mind. for me a skill that is regrettably quite rusty. So far the book is pushing my understanding of what it means to think. and how that pertains to ai. I have some ideas that have spawned from shower thoughts and transformed to full on mini essays. It feels like passion. and it makes me feel fortunate to be alive in such an exciting time in history such as this.

I've started to teach coding to a small group of people for free. I don't really think I know why I started this. Maybe a mix between loneliness and looking for purpose. But it's going well some people are taking it quite seriously and learning. People relying on me, in small quantities, always brings out the best in me. And along the way I've learned a lot about myself as well.

I'm excited to approach some of my biggest weaknesses. accept some. and work on others. I've learned that I'm not necessarily a person you want to hang out with every week. I'm a little cynical, a little off putting, a bad drunk. these believe or not are things i'm just accepting about myself (though the drinking will be done less frequently, though probably with vengeful vigor). And then there's speaking. the way I talk, the cadence, the pace, the pauses, the way i talk over people or explain too much, my lack of brevity or pithiness. and that is something I want to work on. To listen to others more, to think more and use fewer words. To learn not to come on too strong. but still show excitement and joy. I think I'm ready for that to be the new me.

which reminds me.

off to my next item. "find youtube speech lessons"

the last agenda item after the "journal" I am finishing now.

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To matter

People tend to aim for happiness when they really want meaning. I’ve see a lot of dissatisfaction and depression with reaching goals and finding comfort. What people really want is growth and trust. People want to do more and be believed in to handle it. People want responsibility. When we don’t have any, we’re aimless and life is meaningless. People think they want happiness, because that’s what we’ve been fed. It’s at the end of every book and every movie, but in reality the story doesn’t end until we die. We don’t ride off to a sunset, we continue on, and what we’re really looking for is more reasons to continue on, to be depended on and trusted, to burden more responsibilities. We want to feel ourselves stretch and grow and become more than what we were yesterday. Happiness is a possible but largely irrelevant outcome. We don’t really want happiness. We want our pain and suffering in this life to add to something and make us greater versions of ourselves.

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the importance of self doubt

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. 

Mark Twain

The cornerstone of my being has evolved from the philosophy behind this quote. This mistrust in self- not because of some broken sense of self confidence, and not due to a lack of arrogance. Life has simply imparted with me an early wisdom that human beings are dumb as shit. 

Our brains are so easily manipulated and misdirected. It’s not a lack of arrogance that has left me in a state a perpetual self doubt but ironically a surplus of it that has allowed me to say that one of the few things I have confidence in is to not be too confident about anything else. Trusting our brains indiscriminately about... well anything really... is a subtle kind of immature and stupid. It takes a healthy amount of skepticism, and research, and proof!, to be responsible, to be respectable, to be wise. 

Certainty is a powerful stance. one that should be held only on the most well considered thoughts and philosophies. I would argue that if one could not fill a page as to why one is certain. and that this page be coherently thought provoking, whilst infallibly built on logical conclusions- that one should refrain from such a stance. Instead embracing the immaturity of the thought or the philosophy and willing and ready to hear other counter points that through, as objective, a consideration, as one can muster, either help to build or tear down one’s own beliefs. In fact the strength and effort of other arguments (namely the new unconsidered points within them) should lead to equivalent amounts of construction or destruction within one’s own stance. If there is no movement during or after the consideration of a well thought out argument with new points, then perhaps one has not truly considered the argument. we are so poor at listening. 

And if we are aware and okay with the idea that we are in fact ignorant to why we are so “sure” of what we believe. Then at the very least we should refrain from the idiotic evangelization of such ideas. Discussion is good, but evangelization? The notion that thoughts one can not logically defend, is worth claiming as truth to others- in particular those who are mentally unequipped to question and ponder their validity (I speak of children and those with child like minds... it is an ever larger pool than I ever seem capable of realizing) is a kind of moral and ethical travesty that is akin to telling children that they are something that they are not... like a god-sent genius that just knows things... or more commonly that you are. 

it’s a very different form of arrogance and narcissism that leads to this very dangerous kind of stubbornness and idiocy, a kind of mental masturbation that leaves gullible people vulnerable to dumb ideas, incapable of defending their own minds from pretty words, while also propping up the original “truth” spreader with all kinds of misguided ideas, for example, that their following implies validation of truth, when in fact, it is simply the blind leading the blind. 

We deserve to be better to our brothers and sisters of humanity, we deserve to be better to ourselves... even when it takes a bit of work. 

Where the conundrum exists, even in such a simple truth as the importance of self doubt, is that preaching such things should also come with the awareness that it may hurt some who are not ready to hear it. It’s best reserved for those who seek to find these truths themselves... and yet... oddly that concept seems to be self fulfilled and unneeded. I’ve found that those who wander into such desires for freedom from misconceptions and misinformation (even and especially within the very things they have already, through habit and practice, believe to be certain) also seem to be those that are more than capable of reaching the same philosophical conclusions without any help. So sadly such writing of carefully crafted spilled thoughts as the very text you have now read, is simultaneously most enjoyable, and most obvious to those who already know and understand what is trying to be shared as new. While it is in fact both most important and most harmful to share with those that are most unready to hear it. Life is filled with such ironies. 

[scribbleagain]

dried

I still keep your desk empty,  your closet untouched and stay on one side of the bed some sleeping part of me still treats such things as sacred even though all waking parts no longer believe in such things I guess I still put some magic in old dead trinkets, strung up on my mind like dried flowers and dreamcatchers But no tears reach me just tiredness  and the occasional sigh 

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needing

we’re fragile our soft skin and brittle bones we can puff out our chests but when I hold your wrist, like air, I can feel how much you need to be touched to be held and felt isn’t that what holds us all together? why your body drapes over mine? why I share my warmth as your breath slows? cause otherwise, we’d never really need anything from one another But we do. we need to be felt and loved, to be fragile, while we pass through 

[scribbleagain]

still

If I wait here long enough something beautiful always happens

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prayer

I think sometimes we pray, and it’s just a way, for us to keep living- to hope and want, and say the things we need to carry on. 

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You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

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true

Socrates believed that to have wisdom the 1st thing you must admit is when you don’t know The attitude that things must be simple in order to be true is at the core of why we as a people are so fucked so often. Sometimes the truth is actually complex, and you should decide to learn it or admit that you don’t know it. 

[scribbleagain]

Arguing & Change

It is a human thing to double down or run in the face of opposition; it’s a shame that such evolutionary tendencies pollute our ability to digest opposing ideas, often placing either ego or fear above rational thinking. I wonder how much calmer we would be as a people, if more of us were made aware of our innate, fear-induced aggressive or evasive responsive natures— our own brain’s severe ineptitude to distinguish greater generalizable truths from incidental sensory based observational or experiential conclusions (privy to huge misunderstandings and deception). If we were more quickly willing to abandon lesser formed ideas for more fully formed ones, I wonder how much more eager we would be to learn and improve our understandings of ourselves— our own thoughts, our own system of beliefs and how they come to be. In our exponential spike of conscious development in the last several thousand years I wonder how much we’ve been held back as a species by our inability to sit down with one another and share ideas without feeling an urge to be dismissive or threatened. Maybe the progress we’ve made to the conditions and circumstances surrounding the improved quality of human life has pulled uncomfortably further than our DNA’s ability to adjust and optimize for those circumstances. Because the more I think of it, the more that bickerings between party lines, religions, races, sexes and the fucking shape of the planet and the like, seem so archaic and brutish; almost childlike in the way that opposing sides so rarely budge and often rather hold more firmly to existing beliefs even when better opposing discussion and debate should at least rationally encourage some deeper self interrogation. I hope we can move towards a future that encourages and rewards people for regularly asking themselves questions. That we not seek to just solidify arguments but at times also to break them down and replace our own questionable beliefs with better ones. And then and only then... maybe, just maybe, we can stop being such fucking idiots.

[scribbleagain]

Parker's a young kid, pretty good on the sax. Gets up to play at a cutting session, and he fucks it up. And Jones nearly decapitates him for it. And he's laughed off-stage. Cries himself to sleep that night, but the next morning, what does he do? He practices. And he practices and he practices with one goal in mind, never to be laughed at again. And a year later, he goes back to the Reno and he steps up on that stage, and plays the best motherfucking solo the world has ever heard. So imagine if Jones had just said, "Well, that's okay, Charlie. That was all right. Good job." And then Charlie thinks to himself, "Well, shit, I did do a pretty good job." End of story. No Bird. That, to me, is an absolute tragedy. But that's just what the world wants now. People wonder why jazz is dying.

Whiplash

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fear and clarity

confronting things that make you feel unsafe, cornered, or helpless, with unclouded eyes, focus, and clarity is what distinguishes a child from a fighter. 

I’m tired of seeing people cower in fear. Wish there were more courage in the world.

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do you remember the first time you were called annoying? how your breath stopped short in your chest the way the light drained from your eyes, though you knew your cheeks were ablaze the way your throat tightened as you tried to form an argument that got lost on your tongue. your eyes never left the floor that day. you were 13. you’re 20 now, and i still see the light fade from your eyes when you talk about your interests for “too long,” apologies littering every other sentence, words trailing off a cliff you haven’t jumped from in 7 years. i could listen to you forever, though i know speaking for more than 3 uninterrupted minutes makes you anxious. all i want you to know is that you deserve to be heard for 3 minutes for 10 minutes for 2 hours forever. there will be people who cannot handle your grace, your beauty, your wisdom, your heart; mostly because they can’t handle their own. but you will never be and have never been “too much.

Tyler Ford (via ryfii)

♡

(via conniepark)

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We must tend to the things that are dangers to ourselves, lest they overcome us. 

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[scribbleagain]

my favorite kind of important thing,  is a thing that i treasure that is plain to others