Okay am I gonna talk about how great my life is again–strange I keep wanting to do that now when my entire life up until recently, I’ve always wanted to use writing as an expression of my anger, frustration and negative thoughts and granted, I was often trying my best to turn it into something positive, but up until recently almost all of my writing–well there’s a lot of joy in my stories I write–but especially with my journal, i mostly only wrote when I was upset about something.
Now I mostly just want to express the positivity–though I guess if you look back and try to take me literally, I am talking about more negative topics, some really negative, but I don’t know, it’s like my heart is coming from a much different place now and my writing always seems to lead me toward positivity.
Tool’s Jimmy is on and it made me think of a Tool concert I went to like 20 odd years ago and there was a preacher outside protesting against their music and inside at some point, Maynard was like “Whatever you’re experiencing here tonight, good, bad, confusing, whatever, can I just ask that you take this experience, this moment, and just feel it and then try to turn it into something positive for you and your community.”
And that’s good advice for whatever you’re doing or experiencing.
But blah blah blah I imagine people will say I’m just bragging about how awesome my life is, which I guess is fair. But it’s also, like i want to understand it so I don’t lose it and so I can help others. There were so many little things that I did differently compared to how most people live their lives.
Like smoking weed and experimenting with psychedelics back in the late 90’s early 2000’s before any of that shit was legal. Seemed like so crazy and stupid, but it made sense and it turned out to be the right choice. Dropping out from Western Washington University was one of the best decisions I ever made (da hell was I gonna do with an English literature degree?) but going back to web development school at Skagit Valley College was also one of the best choices I ever made.
Definitely becoming a software developer. So thankful for that career choice.
But also moving away from Seattle was a huge positive for me and coming to Pittsburgh. Something about Seattle just never worked for me. I was there for like 7 years and just never felt like I belonged. Never felt like home. I felt welcomed into Pittsburgh.
Also hated, but welcomed. I have a lot of complaints about Pittsburgh. So much more violent and unsafe and dirty compared to Seattle, but it feels like home and it feels like I have a huge network of friends and in Seattle I felt like–well, “The Seattle Freeze” as they call it. It’s a real thing, I think.
Investing my money. So many people just buy short term luxuries instead of planning for the future.
I mean, practically everyone. Practically everyone does money wrong. I just can’t wrap my brain around getting a loan for a car. That’s just so predatory. Car loans have destroyed so many of my friend’s financial future and everyone just accepts it. Because destroying your financial future is more acceptable than walking a couple hours a day in our culture.
But overall it’s been my attitude that I think was the best choice. My commitment to my belief that the human brain is pliable. That’s how I turned myself bisexual/pansexual in my early twenties. I was 100% straight. Never had a single gay fantasy or dream or anything. If anything I found homosexuality repulsive, though I still supported gay rights and everything. But I had a gay friend who really did fit the extreme conservative stereotype of a gay man out to recruit the straight guys. He really did recruit me and I went along with it and damn am I glad I did.
The gays really do have an agenda and that agenda massively benefitted my life.
I can’t even describe how much better my life is since embracing the LGBTQ community–but see I had to do it by completely rejecting one specific liberal view of sexuality–the view that if you questioned it, liberals could actually get quite hateful, but this idea of “born this way”. Like there’s no choice in our sexuality, like we’re all slaves to our biology. I’m so glad that view is falling out of fashion, thanks to many in the gay community who have been coming out and saying “no I chose to be this way and I have nothing to be ashamed of for that choice.”
We take charge of our lives.
Just like the motto of my app.
So I guess that’s another thing I did right with my life, was being able to ignore all the screaming voices shouting in unison telling me something is true if I can see that it’s not.
So many lies in our society. The best skill is not just being able to see them, but being able to actually change your behavior in response to your knowledge.
It’s like these parents who read scientific studies about how there’s no real harm in allowing your child to swear at home and allowing them to do so actually increases their communication skills in the long run, but then these parents still put all the same rules on their kids that the uninformed parents do and just say “well I don’t want them to judge me”.
If I go along with what society is doing it’s because I legit think that in some way it makes sense–at least that’s how I try to be.
My rejection of automobiles is another big one. No one applies science or logic to automobiles. Everyone feels safe in automobiles but me. Ooh look at me I’m making some sweeping statements that are mostly hyperbolic and I probably can’t back up.
But really, rejecting automobiles has made my life so so much better.
Though I have been driving a lot more lately, since I’m doing Jiu-Jitsu two or three days a week. I also seem to be getting more Red Cross calls lately.
Anyway, what am I talking about?
I also wanted to talk about some guy on the road who tailgated me so I slowed down cuz it’s not safe to go that fast with a giant truck riding your ass which made him get even closer and in the end he was just a couple feet behind me, a giant RAM truck vs my tiny economy car in what I can assume was his fit of rage at me trying to be safe on the highway and it’s funny I mention that moving away from Seattle was such a good thing for me–this is the one exception to that–the roads are so much insanely more dangerous here compared to Seattle. Every time I go back, which is once or twice a year, I can drive anywhere around Seattle or Bellingham and never be stressed out about it. Here in Pittsburgh, every time I drive somewhere it’s like this looming sense of doom because of people like the guy in that truck. (And the truck that ran into me two weeks ago because he didn’t see me or understand there were two turn lanes. Thank God I found my horn in time that day. But at least that guy just made a mistake. This guy in the RAM truck was actively hateful and threatening, simply because I was trying to be a safe driver.) We just didn’t have people like that back in Seattle, or if we did, they were a rare sight that would cause everyone to stop and exclaim in horror. Here tailgating is just normal and I’m considered the crazy one for being worried about it, even after I lost two family members to automobile accidents.
I just don’t get it.
Most of my life it seems I’m just trying to wrap my brain around how people can be so horrible to each other. I can’t wrap my brain around how someone could spank their child or want to build a wall between us and Mexico or want to put anyone but the most violent offenders in prison. I would simply never be able to live with myself if I did any of those things.
I was about to say I don’t know why I’m so different but I do know why I’m different: because I can see that being different is wildly rewarding. Ironically, it’s often the people who most passionately disagree with me are the ones who reward me the most.
What I don’t understand is why so few people want to join me.
I guess that was another thing I did right: my time I spent as a born again Christian, and while I never got through The Bible, just it was like my own little private Christianity you know? Like I had a personal relationship with Jesus that wasn’t dictated by any church or holy text. It was just me and spirituality and I used Jesus as like the focal point. And it’s funny I’m an Atheist now as well as before this, but I learned so much from that period that I say it was one of the smartest things I ever did… even though believing in God almost lead me to do some really fucked up things but I guess that’s a story for later.
But that’s what taught me to reject all that vengeance and cruelty. I kind of have Jesus and Christianity to thank for a lot of the good things in my life even though I only went to church a few times and reject a huge portion of their values–at least it seems that way from the outside–but maybe that’s just an illusion.
But vengeance, cruelty and this attitude of us-vs-them is so baked into everything we do and believe as humans that we just never take a step back and realize that the people who reject cruelty to their absolute core and embrace teamwork attitudes, compassion and empathy even when dealing with psychos and horrible people, well we succeed at life. We go through life surrounded by joy and wonder and love and when we do it right, as I think I have, it can actually be maintained over the long term.
In those books where they talk to the expert hostage negotiator and ask them how they do it, they say well you gotta genuinely see the criminal as a team member and you need to work with them instead of against them. There are so many examples of this. Now that hostage negotiator may turn off his empathy for the criminal the moment the scene is over but it’s like, those concepts are clearly proven on the small scale. I’m convinced they work on the large scale too.
I think Jesus would agree with me.
I think a lot of people still believe in Jesus?
I’m listening to a book right now, Habits of a Peace Maker by Steven T Collis so I guess all this is fresh on my mind.
And I recently finished a book called What Technology Wants which was a fantastic book that also makes me think of this idea that we are all a single organism, like each a cell in this massive body and together we can do a million times more than we ever could as a collection of individuals. We just need to recognize that we are a team.
Okay so this entry felt really disjointed and rambling and kind of repeating what I said in my previous entry. I kind of wanted to talk about how some people feel safe in society for some reasons and how no one seems to agree on what is and is not safe and what feels safe and it feels like we’re all scared of these phantoms like I’m scared of being murdered for being a pacifist and not supporting the military or for talking about my police brutality experiences and people don’t understand that, and how I’m terrified of cars, but how I don’t understand how anyone could be scared of the forest or animals or interacting with people who are different from you.
Maybe these entries will be better if I do them more often. It’s like I’m trying to fit all the emotions of a week and a day into an hour or so of disjointed rambling. But finding the time… time time time always the limiting factor.
Maybe I should tell some more life stories. Like the time I fat shamed someone or the time–
no no, what am I doing? It’s like I’m trying to end this entry with a mic-drop moment or something but I know I have absolutely nothing so I just keep typing hoping something will come to me.
Okay let’s just call this one done. Sorry everyone.
Sunday, January 19, 2025
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