How did I get here? Really, how? Who and why as well

And the days go by and the water flowing underground...

ONCE IN A LIFETIME

And if you'd like to make sure that it's all the same as it ever was, here's the lyrics

But damn... it's weird... I really don't think I was going to be here. In fact, in high school I considered myself distinctly un-technical and was somewhat proud for bucking the Indian computer whiz stereotype (But then I decided to buy a stereo...). On the other hand my oldest brother's a tech whiz and I took a bunch of comp-sci classes and I also was involved with the Computer Club (which I tried to steer into a creating sentient artificial intelligence direction, but they said it was "unrealistic" and "delusional").

Still the comp-sci-y part of me always seemed a little less than the other parts and that my career would take me...

But what is a career? (let's look at webster..., though dude Webster, shiny-ness does not excuse a website so crowded with slow running js that it's barely usable (yeah I'm looking at you Mashable))

In a lot of ways, who I am, highly religious, writer-ly, and overall a jack-of-all-trades, hasn't changed much from my days as a 5-year old... but damn...

I guess a lot of my amazement at who I am now comes from 3 things:

1. I went through a period where any prospect of the future seemed unrealistic since I thought death was imminent
2. On occasion my imagination runs away with my ambition (but they never actually elope! I mean really!) and I have dreams of myself as widely read and respected and yet only a tiny bit older, if not younger
3. Perhaps most importantly of all, it's the gestalt of it all. Even if I might imagine a bit of myself here or there, to imagine the whole of my being... can I even conceive of it? (I'm pretty sure actually that I can't).

But while there's certain romantics to my surprise, a greater significance maybe the lesson learned. That is to say, if I did not predict who I am now, will I be able to know what I will become. And thus "How did I get here?" begets "Where am I going?"

But actually I know the answer to that...

I'm going to see the King

So take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks.

Goodnight Folks!

And God Bless.

And it all makes you want to scream

A little something from the late great Michael Jackson - Scream

I've been mapping out my past, a common enough task I think, and I've found there are many benefits. You gain a degree of self-learning, a clarification of your understanding of the past, an improvement of your appreciation of good memories and good poeple, and a great story.

There are dangers though: wallowing in self-pity, obsession on the past, renewed bitterness, over-attachment to this life, etc.

But perhaps the most repeated lesson I've found looking over my past is that things were never as bad as I thought they were, nor are they ever as good.

Looking at the past also helps put the present in perspective. I can say that my current life has been a bit rough at times (though not nearly as rough as the life of others mind you), but looking back I find it's amazing that my life is at least better than this period or that period, and so it's not that bad, and I ought to thank God that I got past those past crises because they were pretty damn bad.

Take for example my crisis of April/May 2008 - where I was almost certain I was going to fail a number of classes and need to take another semester (although in retrospect it may have been a good idea to take another semester and get a CS double-major, although who knows how that would have reshaped who I am today?)

Compared to that crisis, my feelings today are light and fluffy, and while I should not take my feelings to lightly (after all, like speed they can kill), it is a bit comforting that I got over that, it chastises my self-pity a bit, and it reminds me - life can suck sometimes, but it is still worth it. I look at that period and there's no way I can reconcile it with the idea I was secretly happy, no I was miserable, but there was still a beauty in that period of life, because I strove to live and live rightly and serve God in my life. Screw the misery, even the crises are beautiful.

And I got a little Facebook posting from that period to prove my point. As miserable and self-pitying that the posting is, I like to think it's a good piece of writing, and well worth looking back upon, or for those who have not read it, for the first time upon. Especially as the most major of the points are still valid, you can always trust God to get you through the bad times, and even when the thrill of life is gone, you still got to go on (and indeed move along):

So here's the posting which I after the fact labeled "Scream":

Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone

Little bit of Jack and Diane
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT9tpKXFd8A

Of course the best thing that John Cougar Mellencamp has given us is this line from How I Met Your Mother (Aldrin Justice):

Barney: Tonight, just like John Mellencamp, I am going to get rid of the cougar once and for all.

If you don't get it watch the episode.

Anywho, I'd like to thank everyone who gave me birthday messages, it was a nice gesture. If it seems odd to not write this till now, well, my life has been a little bit of a crapstorm this last couple weeks. And now that I come to the end of this semester it seems everything is coming up failure, partial or completely, and even my successes seem to be interspliced with failure. And this has all left me pretty miserable.

If I had some time to relax and move away from that mindset, maybe that wouldn't matter so much, but I have more work to do, I have to clean up the mess I've been dealing with lately, I have to deal with potentially failing one or more classes, and this sucks. So life's not going to be enjoyable for a while now.

But life goes on. And one day, really one day, maybe in a month, maybe in two, someday probably not too far from now, I will be getting out of this crapstorm, or I will learn to deal with it. I have great faith that God will get me through all this, but I'm having trouble finding enjoyment in life anyways, and in worse case senario, and I need to deal with the aftermath of these failures and the reactions of my family to these matters, which will likely be as uncomfortable as the problems themselves, I might be living in a crapstorm till the end of the summer or beyond. But still life goes on, I'll have moments of happiness now and then, and someday life will get better. So life goes on.

Even if for now, the thrill of living is gone.

-- Fin --

So how thrilling is living now?
At times very much so, at times terrible. Are things getting better? Off and on, yes. Do I trust God for the future, I am trying to, and I think for the most part succeeding. And looking back, I can say all and all, things are not so bad, maybe not great, but, to paraphrase Hamlet:

In this sleep of life, what dreams may come?
And then in death too, what dreams might appear?

Anywho, take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

And God Bless.

I too must be left behind

So a while ago, I dealt in a long session about my feelings about a girl who caused my second heartbreak (I use that word to simplify an annoyingly complex situation). But I've overall gotten over it, except I wish, I wish we could still be friends (I also still have some feelings of guilt over the way the relationship ended and until just a bit ago I had some fear that since she had had some depression problems that she was dead). I really liked this girl and to have no contact with her seems just sad. Well, let me take a step back from present time to a couple years ago when I had some stronger lingering feelings, I saw her name on Facebook. Given that she had cut off contact with me and that I had attempted several unsuccessful times to contact her immediately after that (phone calls, emails, etc.), it probably was a bad choice to send her a message, or maybe it wasn't I'm not really sure. But I had thought that time had passed and perhaps we could become friends even if romance was out of the question.

Soon after that she removed her Facebook account.

Now I see she's started a new one (at another college, though, making me wonder whether I provoked a breakdown in her forcing her to switch colleges, and even though that is a very arrogant and paranoid thought, it still bothers me). This has provoked some deep relief for me because I had feared that her problems had finally gotten to her, but it also raised the question should I try to contact her again. The sensible answer taking into consideration the past is no. But right now, having just seen her Facebook account I find myself filled with sadness, regret, and self-loathing and I almost feel that if I could talk to her all that could go away.

But first of all, given my past try it probably wouldn't bring a reply, it might prompt her to remove her Facebook account (although a less me-centric view of the situation might conclude that for other reasons she left her previous college and that caused her to remove her Facebook account since this was back in the day when Facebook was still for college kids (and not you high school bums, yeah you know who you are BUMMMMMMS!!!!)), it might simply bother her and I don't want to do that. It's unlikely that anything she could say could erase feelings that are have stretched themselves way beyond the rational. While I did some really stupid things when I was trying to get her to be my girlfriend, nothing I did was really that bad, and while it would be nice to have contact with her, not having contact with her isn't the end of the world. Yet it feels like I was a monster to her and it feels like not being able to contact her is the end of the world, and this sucks a great deal, but it's not something rational, and it's not something that could be defeated by getting even a good answer from her (it certainly won't be helped by a bad answer). Instead I simply have to remind myself of the truth, I wasn't that bad, and while I did love her, I have moved on in my life. And though the waves of emotion will crash upon me still, if I keep that in mind, and try to keep living my life and not wallow in depression, eventually this too will fade. A part of me is sad about that, insisting that my feelings for her should never fade and that I should try no matter what to win her over.

But she doesn't love me, and I have accepted that, and even if it makes me sad I have to keep my feelings for her dead and gone, because she, for whatever reasons she had, she had to leave me behind, and now I must do the same.

I wanted to be all you need

Perhaps in response to my newest, I guess, prehaps crush, perhaps, but the point is that I seem to be dwelling in my memories of the last time I had, well, to summarize a complicated situation in a short and completely and utterly cliched way, the last time I had my heart broken. I imagine it's just a way of my brain telling me to stop trying and just give up on women. The relation between this and the title (not that there needs to be a reason between the title and subject of a session, at least in my book and my book is the only one that counts, especially after I start writing it) is that the title is part of the chorus of the song Here is Gone by the Goo Goo Dolls (I'm not a fanatic on the Goo Goo Dolls but I like them pretty well and especially, most especially this song, which is actually somewhat, although not totally atypical from most of their stuff), anyways, that song, especially that line sums up that heart-breaking occurance pretty well. When it strikes me there are parrellels between a song and my life I like to try to explicate it a little and so I thought I'd explore that a little (now this may seem a little random since, well, ok, here's the deal, I've wanted to talk for a while about the last time my heart was broken because well, it's a good piece of who I am, and this is one of the less uncomfortable ways to do this), so let's look at the lyrics and I'll explicate a couple lines with my life, let's do this!

Here is Gone
By Goo Goo Dolls

You and I got somethin
But its all and then its nuthin to me, yeah
I'm trying to do this in a way that avoids naming names, but I suppose since there are very few people who actually know or care much about our whatever it was, I can let loose some details. I met her when I was hospitalized in a mental instution, I got out before she did, and even after she got out we didn't really see each other and so although we kept contact through phone and email there were times when I could almost forget about her, when she was gone from my mine, but most of the time I was filled with passionate insensity about her, that somethin we had was nuthin sometimes but usually it was all to me.

And I got my defenses
When it comes through your intentions for me, yeah
I don't know if this really applies, maybe that's why I usually forget these parts of the lyrics, see while I had intentions, I wanted her as my girlfriend, I wanted a relationship, etc., she, she, well I don't know what she thought, but I don't think she had much intentions for me, she liked me at least at friend level at first at least, but the one time she actually really got into the whole boyfriend/girlfriend thing she told me that she didn't think she could deal with that stuff at the time, my interpertaion of that was clumsy, stupid and insensitive, basically I thought well, I'll wait a while and then she'll want to be my girlfriend and then after a while I said, well I think we're boyfriend and girlfriend at least that's how it is to me, I didn't see if she was ready despite the fact that she had been having all these things to deal with, and maybe I'm being to critical of myself, but it was awfully stupid to just come out and say that when I hadn't seen her in person since I left the hospital. So if anything my defences were my delusions of a romantic relationship to her intentions for me, which were ultimately nothing


And we wake up in the breakdown
With the things we never thought we could be, yeah
We were both dealing with breakdowns at the time, people warned me not to try for a relationship because of that, but, well I did, and so well, again to summarize in a overly-simplified and overly-cliched way, I got my heart broken



Im not the one who broke you
Im not the one you should fear
If I still had any contact with her I would tell her that...I dunno, I never meant her any harm, that I'm really just harmless, and so there was never any reason to fear me, if she did fear me, I don't know if she did. It's another one of the dimensions of that situation which I don't understand. But I really wish that if we couldn't be girlfriend and boyfriend we could at least be friends, but instead she stopped responding to my emails and calls and so I have to assume she had a little bit of fear about me, and if I could I would just like to assure her that I'm not the one you should fear

We got to move you darlin
When she was still in the hospital I used to tell her that if she wanted I would break her out and run away from her. I was high on the emotion and young and said all sorts of crazy, stupid stuff like that.

I thought I lost you somewhere
But you were never really ever there at all
I would pretend with people that she was my girlfriend, I told myself that I was just simplifying the matter, but the truth was I wanted to pretend, but she never told me that she was my girlfriend and in the end all the romantic dreams I had of us came to nothing


And I want to get free
Talk to me
So much of that period in my life was just trying to get away from my fears and anxieties and my disease, but when I talked to her a certain peace washed over me, that's how I think you know you're in love, when just talking to someone can make you feel completely and utterly healed and whole, I miss that

I can feel you falling
And I wanted to be
All you need
I knew she was still having problems and I wanted so bad to make them all go away, I wanted to be the one to take away all her pain because I felt that she could do that for me and I wanted to be the one she relied on, I wanted to be her superhero, but perhaps she didn't need any of that or perhaps she just didn't want it from me

Somehow here is gone
In the end that all belongs to the past, she cut off contact with me, and I no longer want to bother her with my attempts to renew contact. I did try very recently, but I think she made it clear she doesn't want to deal with me, even if she never actually said it. The thing is though, because I know she suffered from the same sort of problems I did I worry about the fact that I can't contact her, because what if she's dead, and what if it's my fault, and what if she's dead?


I am no solution
To the sound of this pollution in me, yeah
I still don't know how to solve all my anxieties and fears and disease, I can make things better but I don't know how to get rid of all this, except to trust in God to save me

And I was not the answer
So forget you ever thought it was me, yeah
I never knew how to really help her, so no matter how I wanted to help her, I was not the answer but these lines, especially the second belong more to her, because in the end she was not the answer to my problems either and she probably would wish that I would forget you ever thought it was me

Im not the one who broke you
Im not the one you should fear
We got to move you darlin
I thought I lost you somewhere
But you were never really ever there at all

And I want to get free
Talk to me
I can feel you falling
And I wanted to be
All you need
Somehow here is gone

And I dont need the fallout
Of all the past thats in between us
In the end this is past, and I'm tired of dwelling on the scars that these events left on me and I'm sure she is too. Of course, the past is a part of us and I like who I am and so I don't really wish it gone, unless, unless the fallout ends up really hurting one of us. But I really think I'm sort of over this, for a long time I would dwell endlessly on this situation and just like it once inspired me to write love poems the situation then compelled me to write poems of despair and then to despair so much that writing no longer seemed worth it, but eventually I moved on from it, still it is a part of me and from time to time my mind wonders to those days and it makes me smile to remember the good times with her and then it makes me sad to remember how things ended up, especially now that I'm feeling a new crush, not love mind you, but still probably, perhaps, an actual crush, my mind drifts back to this, perhaps trying to justify my fears of making any attempt to ask this new girl out

And I'm not holding on
And all your lies weren't enough to keep me here
Like I said I'm not holding on to this stuff anymore, I mean it's a part of me, but it's no longer my obsession. But the second line doesn't apply to me, she never lied to me, but perhaps it's owed to her, I told her that I would do all sorts of romantic stuff, and I wroter her all sorts of romantic stuff but in the end I didn't see her in person once after she left the hospital, and all my romantic fantasies came to nothing (well, they did inspire various writings, including the epic poem, but when it came to what I gave her, it came to nothing, I always really did want to give her gifts and shower her with love, but while I gave her some random crap in the hospital and wrote her stuff, ultimately, in the end, it really amounted to very little), she could say very justified that all your lies weren't enough to keep me here and I could say nothing in response except I'm sorry and I didn't mean to lie, but that really amounts to very little and much too late


And I want to get free
Talk to me
I can feel you falling
And I wanted to be
All you need
Somehow here is gone

And I want to get free
Talk to me
I can feel you falling

I know its out there
I know its out there
I know, when I'm not paranoid about her being dead from suicide and depression or something, I know that she's still out there and I wonder and sometimes I used to even fantasize about what if I met her again, so, what was my love, well I know it's out there but since I can't really do anything about it, I guess that's not that important except for the comforting thought that the world's better off for having her out there

And I can feel you falling

I know its out there
I know its out there
Somehow here is gone, yeah

I know its out there
I know its out there
Somehow here is gone, yeah
In the end it's over, it's done with, it is gone but the fear it brings still remains, and that's one of the reasons in addition to my natural paranoia and anxiety I've been so nervous about asking girls out and especially nervous about what I'm feeling now with this maybe crush, of course the whole mess I had with another girl before even my last heart-breaking also left scars, but that's for a different session

It's a good song is it not? Least I think so. I'm sure there's more I could write about this matter, and perhaps someday I will, but I don't feel like doing it now. So anyways, take it to your head, take it to your heart, and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!