Now how does this work?

As soon as I try to type out a thought, it gets scrambled.

For whom am I even trying to type it out? Me? You? Are you me, or am I you? Bhahaha that’s really dumb. But really, target audience is…. whoever happens to be reading it, that’s as specific as I can get unfortunately.

And why am I even trying to type it out? Who or what is this supposed to serve? I guess ultimately that would be my Self. I am doing this because I am suffering, and I am desperately grasping at inner peace. This seems like a odd way to go about that, but it’s less about a bid for blogosphere fame and more about full expression of authentic self. That’s the goal, anyway, we’ll see how successful I’ll be at that. Like everyone else, I have a tendency to let my ego weasel its way into my thoughts and actions too. It will be obvious when that happens, to you the reader of course, not to I the author. If it was obvious to me I would quash it, right? Ok going too far with this…

Why the blog then? Why can’t I just fully express my true and authentic self to the real-world instead of the internet-world. Well I do try that too, but I get frustrated. I’ve been having a very hard time figuring out how being my authentic self can actually help me pay the bills. I am an adult now, technically, I am trying to start a family, I have to bring in some coin to participate in society. Is my authentic self valuable to society? I have had jobs, you might even say an attempt at a career, but I have had little success. I stayed in the lines and went to university, graduated, got a job that was just fine but not terribly fulfilling. I stayed there a year and then left for grad school. I did well in my courses, opted to write a thesis for my masters degree, did… not super great on my thesis but good enough to pass. I really hoped to stay on the project and redeem myself to my Self by kicking ass on a PhD dissertation. It didn’t work out, I got stuck, didn’t know how to move the project along into something worth publishing. My advisor tried but he didn’t know how to un-stick me either. So I left. I got a job that I liked for a small company, but there too, I struggled to contribute equal value to what I cost the company in salary. I did some things very well, but the things that mattered, that counted toward my own growth and the growth of the company, pushing through them felt like swimming through molasses (which is also how one of my first therapists phrased how depression feels, going through life day-to-day is like swimming through molasses…). I left that company after finding what I was sure to be the answer to my career difficulties: a job, nearly exactly in a field I wanted to work in, in a city that my then long-distance girlfriend could move to without major career interruptions of her own. So I gave my two-weeks and moved north, far north by my standards. If I hadn’t left that company then I imagine I would have been fired after not too long anyway, but I had high hopes for the new gig.

I’m going to try to wrap this up, I have other shit to do today. Basically, at this new job, I was struggling yet again. I was working my ass off, long days at the office, then I would come home and work more. I tried so goddamn hard to provide value to the company, but the long hours I put in was not recognized as value, just a lot of time without much to show for it. But I was learning! I was improving! I started to realize how much I was letting myself get distracted away from the task and its deliverables toward trying to define processes and methods of getting to the deliverables, which truthfully were not nearly as important as the deliverables themselves, and if they are important it would be recognized that way by the company and the company would launch an initiative to define them. That became clear and I was fully on-board for it; it came as an a-ha moment, totally crystal. I started pushing through my tasks in well under the time estimates, and turning in high-quality deliverables to boot! But the decision had been made weeks before, and I was fired nonetheless. Eighteen months I spent there.

After leaving I recognize that it was not a great environment anyway, upper management sold themselves as caring and supportive, but then they spent all day running around like the sky was falling (at least that’s how one of our former co-op students put it when I ran into him recently). They also sold themselves as having a “mistakes happen as a team and we fix them as a team” attitude, but they spent a lot of time and energy blaming and guilting people who they perceived as being solely responsible for deficiencies or mistakes (not just me, everybody made mistakes, even the high-ups, but they never saw it as a team effort, it was always somebody’s fault).

That last paragraph might have just been my ego making my Self feel better about my own faults, but there is enough truth in it for it not to be totally dismissed.

So anyway, where am I now? Unemployed, draining my severance, applying for unemployment benefits, applying for jobs, losing my hair, trying to keep my relationship from crumbling, feeling like a square peg in a round hole, wondering if I will ever be successful at work given the repeating pattern of failure, flabbergasted that I’m struggling to be successful knowing that I can actually do a lot of things really fucking well, honestly.

Ah, that’s the point of all this. I can do a lot of things really fucking well, but damn if it ain’t tough to demonstrate that to the world or leverage what talents I do have to support myself financially. So I thought that I would just throw my Self out there, do the things that I am naturally inclined to do, show them to whoever cares to look, and hope that somewhere along the way I find where I fit in this world.

Annnddddd publish!

They detected graviational waves

BBC

I fucking love science, too

That’s pretty cool.

I wish I did it, says the ego.

blarg

Adventure Time Season 6 Episode 12 – Ocarina

This episode suggests a possible avenue for understanding between people who are satisfied with what they’ve got and people who view life as a competition.  It’s more critical of the latter, following the bias of the show, but I’d hope people could excuse that seeing as how holistically the episode is unifying, since it could facilitate a loving connection between these vastly dissimilar thinking styles.

Blahblahblahblahblah

A person will never mature without first acknowledging their own flaws. Similarly, humanity as a whole is doomed to destroy itself, if we can’t lovingly look back on our collective self, recognize we are collectively assholes, and do our best to make amends with the Earth.

That’s all 🙂

Reddit insights (lol)

Question from u/oldsoul-

Some months ago I had intense awakening. Catalyst became during a moment of reframing beliefs, when I could not explain away my identity anymore.

Before this, I had developed overt and quite unhealthy ego. I had identified myself solely as my ideal self, while I had disidentified my negative qualities as conditioned self that were not real ‘me.’ Little did I know how wrong I were about it, until there was a sudden ego death that transformed my view of self-identity totally.

After the experience, I felt like I had lost good amount of self-confidence. It was like my ego was not as “edgy” as before, and there were significantly less feelings of superiority towards others. What exactly happens when the ego reconstructs after impermanent awakening at the level of brain and psyche? Is it possible that permanent awakening fails with deflated ego -> transforms it to relative normalcy, and with a person that would have healthy ego, there would had been more-as permanent awakening – as the quality of ego is a product of past actions, thoughts and words, in means of karmic explanation?

Reply from u/veragood

A favorite author of mine calls it the mask of ruthlessness. Ruthlessness being the Tao, the way of nature. Think about how beautiful and yet pitiless nature is. It is totally demanding and yet totally supportive. It is as “cold”, ie, impersonal, as intergalactic space, moving on its way with or without the assent of sentient beings.

Awakening is often understood in contrast to the ego, because for many of us, ego is all we know, so it makes sense to give us perspective. So awakening vis-a-vis the ego can be seen as awakening to a frightening aspect of existence; our oneness with the immensity of creation, the incredible impersonal force of life that bursts forth and rolls all squirming created beings towards the jaws of inevitable death. This is a great source of fear; it is the fear of the unknown. Perhaps it is the only source of fear, at the end of the day.

So we wake up to our depth; we really become awake to infinity, which is simultaneously peaceful (everything’s here, safe, and it’s always been this way), but also terrifying and chaotic and threatens to scramble our brains if it doesn’t swallow us mercilessly. We meet this Fact face to face and our lives are changed forever. We may bask in a glow of awakening, or we may crawl into a cave and avoid the world. And this works for a while. But we can’t really function in day-to-day life if we are either frightening to others, or frightened by our constant connection to something unfathomable.

Underneath the mask of ruthlessness is something unspeakable, something far more marvelous and undeniably real than our wildest fantasies. It is some no-thing before which all beings shut the fuck up. But we want to get on. We want to mingle, to spread love. Hence the mask.

Calling it a mask can seem crude, but its no real different from what you were doing before, except this time, because you are a lucky and blessed motherfucker, you never ever mistake the mask for who you really are. By doing that, you guarantee that when it comes time to shed the mask, you’ll give it one last good dance macabre, one last good look at this nice little infinite microcosm of a human life, before the curtain falls, and then that mask will get rolled on to infinity and you won’t try to chase it. Or maybe you will. It’s up to you, either way.

The mask of ruthlessness is not a difficult concept. A mask could be simple reasonableness. Be the most reasonable person you can be. Or be curious, constantly curious. Or earnest. Or carefree, someone without scruples. Or be a healer. A crafty handyman. It’s really up to you, up to your own particular temperament. By the time we awaken, whether its in our teens, twenties, thirties or eighties, our personality and ‘nature’ are already pretty set it stone. Just follow your natural bliss, just do what makes you giggle a lot; gravitate towards something that comes easy, because that will free up energy that you can direct in marvelous ways. All that matters is that you never forget that you are not just that mask, that you are also all things seen, unseen and beyond.

No comments on this at the moment. Just thought it held some truth.

Am I alive?

Yes, obviously. This will be fun.

So, you’re not doing this for people. You are doing this to archive all the dumb shit that shapes who you are becoming. If other people find themselves here, that would be cool. If they actually agree with some dumb thing you said was interesting, that would be cool too. But mostly, you’re talking to yourself.  That’s also cool. Because you are interesting to talk to. You have thoughts that other people don’t have. Some of those thoughts mesh well with others’ realities, others are batshit crazy. Which is which?! You don’t know! One thought is as good as another to you, until a later thought tells you an earlier thought bears no relevance to your world.

Anyway, enough of that. What finally got you to start this up after years of thinking blogs are dumb, followed by many months of seeing blogs as a great new medium for inter-connectivity and shared consciousness, followed by more months of feeling shitty for not being interesting or funny or smart or wise enough for anybody to care about anything you might throw up on a blog post, followed by maybe a month of self-debate over whether you should or shouldn’t?

Joe Rogan? You always thought he was kind of a meathead bro. UFC guy, Fear Factor guy, not-all-that-funny comedian guy. Caitlyn Jenner has been a weird thing to think about. Yeah, she’s brave for being one of the first transgender peeps to have the spotlight shine on her. But she’s fucking dumb as shit! Ok, dial it back, dude, you’ve only seen like one or two things that she’s actually spoken on. But damn it was painful. She said nothing to lead you to believe she moves from a place of love. Changes her sex, seems angry at anyone who doesn’t adore her for it. Speculating here, maybe she’s more loving than you’re aware of. All you’ve seen is her showing the same materialistic predilections, hyper-emotional manipulation, and self-separating attitudes you see everywhere in bullshit western society. Joe Rogan and friends had a great discussion on this very topic. You clicked it thinking he’d say something horrible and transphobic, but actually he seemed to understand your view and expressed it quite elegantly, even if it was a bit brash.

Ok, no more words, here’s the video

This might be your only post ever.