Announcement

I have decided to leave Blogger. I don't like the format or the style, and I like Tumblr better.

Earlier this year I created a Formspring because I needed impetus for my writing, and people could ask me stupid or interesting prompts, and it was fun.

But Formspring basically sucks, so I'm consolidating. Head over to my new blog if you want. Or don't.

I'll be leaving this page up for posterity and I'll link to it in my new shit, but don't expect any more posts.

Bye...

Catheters and Darkness

It's a strange thing to black out. For one, you have a bunch of people coming up to you and telling you about all the things you did, and you can't remember any of them. It's like you've missed out on part of the relationship, and now you're not on the same page as everyone else.

I can think of two similar situations:

1. Someone travels backwards in time, but only in their head. So for instance, Gordon the six year old goes up to his parents and says, "Hi guys. I've just graduated from high school and you're going to need to send me to college or something now. Sorry for robbing you of ten+ years watching your son grow up, by the way. Also, can I have an iPhone?" Or, freshman Gordon walks up to the people who are now my dedicated friends, only back then they didn't know me, and says "Hey guys, so how about that ski trip last winter? Was that crazy or what?" You have no frame of reference.

2. You write a letter to someone, but never give it to them. My girlfriend does this sometimes - she says she does it when she needs to vent, but then sometimes she'll get frustrated and say, "Didn't I already tell you all this?" only to realize that I wasn't privy to that conversation.

...Enter tangent.
It's occurred to me that you never really know anyone. I don't know my parents or friends or anybody, and neither do you. It's like there's a Facebook in your head, and you have profile pages for everyone you've ever met. If you interact with them regularly, you update it more and the profile page becomes nearly identical to their actual personality. If you lose touch, the profile falls into disrepair, and you're surprised when you see them fifteen years later and their face doesn't match their profile picture. If you have a heart-to-heart, their bio expands and expands until it nearly resembles their actual personality, but the fact remains - you don't know anyone. Just like the words we hear are approximations of ideas that we then reverse engineer into similar ideas, the interactions we have with people we know allow us to approximate them more accurately in our heads. So when you have a sex dream about somebody, it's a little awkward to be around them the next day - but only from your end. And if you write a letter to someone but never deliver it, that's a conversation you had with the profile in your head but never with the actual person.
That's what blacking out is like, but even more so because it actually happened. So a bunch of people now have a relationship with me that I don't have with them. Say there's someone I only know by acquaintance, but we have a heart-to-heart on the night in question. The next day, I'm one of their closest friends but they're still only an acquaintance. Or take a good friend, someone that I care about, but when I'm deep in the throes of inebriation I say something that maybe shouldn't ever be said out loud, and now they're still my pal but I'm only the guy that used to be their friend.

Another reason why blacking out is weird is that I can't remember when it began. There's a movie that came out a few years ago, a mediocre rom-com with Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz called What Happens In Vegas. Anyway there's a sequence when they're all getting progressively intoxicated, and everything starts spinning, and the scenes start cutting faster and faster and blending together and everything's kind of loud and a little blurry and it just spins and spins into nothingness. That's actually a very accurate scene - watch it, and you will understand how I remember Sunday night. It's the most frustrating thing; I can't remember when I started being unable to remember. I can't even remember a proper chronology of back when I could remember.

All I remember is sometimes my clothes were on and sometimes they were off and I was running through a house and sometimes I was playing piano and there were a lot of other people and then I was waking up in a hospital and it hurt to pee.

On Graduation and Cracking Lenses

Tomorrow, I will graduate from high school.

Technically, I'll only walk across the stage and receive an empty diploma case. Our real diplomas aren't available until August, and the ceremony is ultimately meaningless anyway.

But tomorrow, I will graduate from high school.

It's an interesting feeling. I've been told for years that I would have a surge of emotions; that nostalgia, regret, and happiness would flood my entire being as I prepared to enter the real world alongside my 273 closest friends. That's just utter bullshit. True, I feel a twinge of regret and I'm a little happy to be done, but high school was neither a dreadful experience to flee nor a glorious experience to savor. It was pretty ok - I did some things well, I did some things I shouldn't have, I didn't do some things I should have, and I had some good times. But all in all, this is process is tiresome and underwhelming. If I could not go to the graduation ceremony, I would - but I imagine that there are a number of friends, acquaintances and supporters who would be disappointed if I played hooky.

What's exciting and scary to me is my future, and that involves my high school very little.

I got rejected from all the schools I really wanted to attend, and I'm now getting excited for a school that was fairly low on my list. This is cause for thought.

I was guaranteed a spot at UC Davis as a result of being in the top 4% of my high school. This notification came very early in my senior year, so I knew all along that I would be going to college. Maybe this made me too complacent in my applications; maybe I didn't go out and try for the Ivy League as strongly as I should have; maybe I was happy to settle with what I'd accomplished already and subconsciously sabotaged my efforts to further.

But this kind of speculation makes me hate myself a little. I met an exchange student from Tanzania last year who talked about the difficulty of getting an education in the developing world. Education after elementary school is unavailable to all but the elite. I have been educated by my government for twelve years. I have been offered a spot at an American University - how can I equate that with failure? Why do I take my rejections from schools with acceptance rates of six or seven percent as precipitously damning, when I landed such a fantastic deal in a respected research institution? I understand that context defines value, that UC Davis was fairly low on the scale of opportunities available to me, but I must not allow the incredible inflation of that scale to define my worth as an academic candidate and as a person.

I must reconcile my expectations with my ability, my evaluative framework with my context, my sense of success with my opportunity.

When I graduate tomorrow, as I reflect on how meaningless the ceremony is to me, as that snarky internal dialogue from the beginning of this entry prances through my head, I will remind myself of the incredible gift this ceremony represents.

I will not take my position for granted, but I will maximize it endlessly.

QUIET.

Something's happening to me right now. I'm hoping that typing these words will help make it stop. It's so hard to type this, but maybe shouting my crazies into the void will make it quieter in here.

I have this thing, I have since I was very young, where once in a while my head will get really loud. It's not like I hear voices, I mean there is a lot of shouting, but everything just gets really loud and intense and it feels like I'm on a wild high but also like I have a fever and the typing of these keys is SO LOUD and i can hear everything, everywhere, and my eyes hurt and i can't
make it stop.

WE'RE TRYING TO WORK HERE.

Quiet in the library, please.

Ah, peace. No ... wait, it's back. Maybe, maybe not - I'll let you know.

EDIT: We're ok. Just a long day, and some serious sleep deprivation, and maybe a little anxiety. Goodnight teddy.

AP Tests

Are God's way of telling us he hates us.

Literature was a breeze.

Physics was a gale.

Government is tomorrow. Forecast is fairly stormy.

It's hard to care about AP tests when I'm putting all my energy into praying for an East Coast school to be kind to its wait list.

On Religion

Question: What is your religious path/idea/choice do you believe in (a) God? Or do you believe in a different entity or deity? explain, if you will.

I am an atheist because nothing in my experience, research, observation or original thought gives me any reason to believe otherwise.

I do not need to create a giant security camera in the sky in order to comport myself according to a determinate ethical calculus. In other words, my sense of morality comes from careful and reasoned analysis of humans, ideas, and the world - not from an arbitrary set of commandments whose only qualifications are a) posterity and b) a convenient symmetry with many of my moral intuitions.

I would not say that I am totally a-spiritual. I have had spiritual experiences in nature - on vision quests, for instance - and I've experienced moments of clarity and enlightenment which sprang into my head as if from a higher being. But I'm a great believer in the immense and uncharted power of the human mind, so while I find that nature is a great way to access a wealth of knowledge and get in touch with other ways of knowing, I find neither truth nor utility in ascribing these experiences to any omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent entity. Rather, I consider spirituality to be an internal process catalyzed by external events and environments.

I guess you could say that I am a rational hippy.

An important distinction is that I am an atheist, not an anti-theist. I disbelieve only because I have been presented with an insufficient case for religion, not out of any determination to reject a theistic model of the universe. In theory, I am open to conversion - although the burden of proof for any Western religion is insanely high. I have no problem with people believing whatever the hell they want, as long as their beliefs don't demand violations of the natural rights of others. However, I have a number of problems with organized religion. Here are some, in no particular order:

1. Exclusivity: it's often not enough to simply live a good life - in many Western forms, worship at their altars is a necessary condition for salvation. Everyone says "we're right, everyone else is wrong" and all we get is a muddled and vitriolic dialogue.

2. Subversion: religion has a terrible track record for social systems, ideas, and practices which are good for society (or at least, aren't objectively bad) but don't support the ideology. Science, freedom of speech, science, gender equality, legal accountability, science, the list goes on...

3. Propagation of unhealthy practices: this is like the converse of #2 - organized religion is responsible primarily for its own survival, so it has a natural incentive only to promote that which fuels itself. We think that the religious cult and the Cool-Aid are tragically serendipitous - I think that the cult of organized religion makes the Cool-Aid inevitable.

It's probably clear that I have a lot to say on this topic. On the other hand, I'm tired of writing this. Thanks for the question, and pay extra attention in those English, grammar, and composition classes.

This was reposted from Formspring. Surprise me with more questions like this.

Copyright 2011 by Owlblink, Inc.

I recently went to the State Championships for debate. I neither did as well as I had hoped, nor as well as my record this year had predicted. Oh well - I won't even care about it in a zillion years.


I did, however, discover something I have titled,
"The Hotel Trifecta of Comfort."
1. Long, hot shower (and freedom from water-bill-guilt)
2. Exhaustive (albeit muffled) weeping
3. Vigorous masturbation


I informed a friend at the tournament, who dropped out a round later. He told me that my advice was invaluable--
"Gordon, that hotel trifecta thing really did the trick! Well, the trifecta minus the shower. And minus the masturbation. I really just had a small, damp cry. But it felt good."


I gotta copyright that shit.
In a foreign city? Feeling down? Trifectize© yourself.