Of Anchors, Introverts & The (Not So) Wonderful Wizard Of Oz

I should probably change the header of this blog to 'The Woes and Mischief of a Confused Humanoid', but that wouldn't be fair because that would imply that I'm at least part human (humanoid) who knows what she's doing (mischief) and knows how to react about it (Woes.)

A lot has been happening recently. And I figured out that part of the reason why I'm not coping as well as I should is because I haven't been taking enough alone time. You see, us introverted people have to learn how to be around other humans; it's a process that's not autonomous and as easily acquired through social osmosis as those of other people.

You spend enough time on your own and you get used to handling everything on your own, which makes it a lot harder on us to include people when they're eventually there. A simple change as spending more time in the living room than you're used to, not having enough time to read as much or having to deal with people on a more regular, and increased, periods of time could throw us off balance.

We're aliens, we'll always be aliens. When aliens lose their privilege of being alienable they start losing themselves. Even using the 'We' pronoun feels all snuggled up where it shouldn't.

I ran out of the office for the first time since I started working there because the kingpin (Or shall I say Queenpin?) professionally smack-talked me. I got assigned a bigass project that will have me shooting caffeine up my jugular vein to perform. And the other game-writing job I became too attached to has been put on hold till September for creative reasons. I see the big ole warlock swisheddy flicked the rugs right out from under me, yet again.

I think the reason people started coupling up or tribing up was because they got seasick. Life's all variables, nothing stays where it should. You start depending on one thing and you be sure it'll be taken away one way or another, so people started grabbing each other at a desperate attempt to have landmarks. Floating anchors, all over the place. That's all there is to it. That's also how it shouldn't be. We're not built for what we're built for, not all of us.

I sometimes wonder how people do it, ones with human anchors. I mean, the woman starts talking and the man starts packing, haven't you watched enough chick flicks? Everybody's got their own problems, and everybody's eager not to have you as one of them.

Funny how everybody wants an anchor to blame.

I'm gonna go read. 

I'm this close to ditching a big job (that I care about) because I'm a runner. What's your poison?

Carla's Cat Heaven.

Something happened last night that shook me up pretty badly. You know what they say, time changes people and what not. But you always think you'll be the exception of that rule; you cast yourself as the hero of all your fantasies, you help old women cross the street and save four-eyed pizza-faced nerds from the big bad bullies, then you get bite-sized surprises as you go along about who you really are as a person.

Yesterday I watched a street dog get whipped and I did nothing about it because of the consequences. There were a bunch of puppies too. They were beaten up pretty badly by some vagrant, so badly you could still hear the wails and the whips at the back of your head and wince recalling the memory. Growing up turns us into cowards. Of course, it's easier to generalize. I guess what I'm trying to say is that growing up has turned 'me' into a pussy.

It's also easy to rationalize, after all it's not that big, it happens everyday right? Worse things happen everyday. If I had done something about it, the guy could have physically attacked me. But that doesn't change the fact that I didn't do anything about it. I stood there and I let it happen, and I could have stopped it. It's easy to think you have no choice when the consequences aren't in your favour, but you do. That's the truth of it. I had a choice and I chose to let the man beat up the helpless dog because I didn't want to get hurt.

Here's the shitty part - not that the last part wasn't shitty - but I'm not sure I'd react differently if I had the chance. I have zero shots against the guy in physical combat, not to mention the fact that this country fails to maintain the most basic of human rights so that says enough about its animal rights policies and pretty much rules out the safer choice of pursuing legal action.

A younger me wouldn't have had the sense to think it through before bolting at the guy with flailing knuckles. That's where the growing up part comes in. We do this everyday; we let go of things we believe in and we become shittier people as the day progresses because we don't want to get into trouble, be it in the workplace or over a nasty argument with friends. We all go through life wanting nothing to do with life, and we sit back with clear consciences because, after all, 'there was nothing we could have done about it' when the truth is this: You're a shitty person and you've been perfectly rinsed into the socially acceptable moral grey we all like so much.

Let me take it from the top. Yesterday I stood by and watched a helpless animal get tortured when there was a lot I could have done about it because it was more convenient for me. Yesterday I took a glimpse at how much of a shitty person I've become, and it's making me wonder what else is in store.

Don Draper, pitching the new Kodak wheel projector: Nostalgia - it's delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means "the pain from an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.

The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I'm not sure why I ended up here. This place is a fixed point in time and space, even the doctor can't touch this. Sometimes, the world feels like a safer place knowing that certain people exist; friends and family, etc. But then you get out of bed, make coffee and go to work because you know better. People aren't fixed points in time and space; they're not untouchables. Even if they were, it's not that they don't cut it, it's that they won't. Humans are the only species with a recognized sense of choice, and funny enough, on asking about the reason for most atrocities, the answer is usually this: "because they can."

I have come to learn that I trust cabs more than friends, and strangers more than acquaintances. I've considered going away on my own more than once, and the idea of being alone doesn't scare me. It's the idea of being confined with people for a week that does; I'm not worried about not finding people to depend on, I'm worried because I'm being made to depend on people. Funny what helpless memories could do to you.

All my life I've been against the assumption that the past shapes you, and I still am. People have a choice, everyday with everything every single time. Your right to make the choice doesn't waver with the frequency with which you have to make it. However, I've noticed something else. As you grow up, you lose the capacity for certain feelings and experiences. Children don't have a fuse, they bounce through life shoving their hands through fire and following strangers into ice cream trucks, then they grow up, watch the movies they weren't allowed to sit through, do things they don't like to get things they don't want and gain the ability and choice to irrevocably fuck up without having a grownup take the fall for them. That's usually when they find out what really happened to the sleeping beauty, and it's not pretty.

That's the thing, you don't have a choice about that. As you gradually lose the capacity for things, you experience them differently even if you ignored all impulses, flares, billboards, naked men running across neuro-highways, floating jedis and TARDIS sounds. That's the gist of midlife crisis, people get stuck in the loop and keep throwing themselves into extreme scenarios hoping to get the same high they did when they were young and wild and remain in denial no matter how many things they cross off the list that failed to give them the proper fix. Just that little jolt of electricity and they'll be alright, they'll be as happy as they should be and things will make sense.

But it doesn't work that way, because we move along one timeline and that timeline is both vector and cumulative. They don't tell you that shit when you're a kid; they mention the gray hairs and the bad memory, but somehow they fail to include that little tidbit of information: Time is zombifying, and if you don't have the stomach for bite-sized delusion, you're in for ghost ride.

Case in point: Japan. Japan is one of the most modern civilizations to date; they have technologies that'll make your head spin, an economy that comfortably affords to treat its average citizen like a goddamn Jetson, a standard of living that combats Utopian ideologies and futuristic Sci-Fi wet dreams and points out where they're lacking through real-life application. They've got it all and they've got it good.

Japan also has the second highest suicide rate in the world.

I remember watching this documentary when I was a kid. (It's a 2008 release, despite the present upload date.) I didn't get it. I thought they had a cultural problem similar to the one that the average Egyptian millennial is suffering from due to the generational gap and overall ironclad grip of religion, I thought they had traditions and family crap that systematically led them to that, I thought that it could be the work pressure. Now that I think about it, it's not any of that. It's this:

"Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive."