a cover letter

To the office of Saint Peter,

Greetings from the planet Earth. I am a simple man of little ambition, who has in these late years of life become distraught and disillusioned by the aimlessness of his existence. The chaos and imperfection of the world around me have led me to question my purpose; indeed, even the limitations of my self have become stumbling blocks in my struggle to find direction. I find little solace in what should bring joy to most men, and not wealth, nor friendships, not even partaking in the apparent pleasures of life, has brought me any closer to such a realization of happiness.

In the midst of the dismal present I find great hope in looking forward to the future, and for this purpose I have sought your audience. I have heard many claims about the nature of life in heaven and have been encouraged by my contemporaries to find placement therein. I therefore write to you in the hope that you will accept my included application for eternal life.

Allow me to begin by stating that I believe I am a well-equipped and suitable candidate for residency in heaven. I have been raised in a household of believers, and have held fast to the faith from an early age, even against attacks by outsiders. I am surrounded by like-minded peers and adhere to my established theology. I obey the doctrines of the church within the confines of the church, which themselves make up a smaller part of my life as a whole, and seek to maintain my beliefs while simultaneously seeking what is best for myself. I have an ultimate goal, which I keep in perspective relative to my shorter-term goals, such as where I will retire in 50 years and what job I will have in 20 years, and what post-graduate university I will attend in 7 years and what undergraduate university I will attend in 3 years.

I also contribute regularly and constructively to the church, in many areas. Being thoroughly talented, I use my abilities in any way to assist its cause. I exercise my God-given gifts to their fullest, in the hope that it pleases the Creator to see creation achieving its potential. These good acts reflect my own personal good nature, as well as my willingness to sacrifice on behalf of what I believe in.

I understand that this application is somewhat before its due time, since I presumably have many years left before I am to pass out of this world. However, I would desire to secure a place ahead of time, so that when I do arrive in heaven there is a designated place waiting for me. I appreciate your consideration in this matter.

Enclosed is a resume outlining each of my specific accomplishments, as well as an overall summary of my status as a Christian. Thank you again for your time and your consideration.

Sincerely,
Forward Thinking

waiting for

For a condign blame
I am waiting
Waiting
The clockwork of fate has been set in motion
Painful contortion
Now but a matter of time

A rat in a cage knew better than to ignore
The fruits of its own retrospection
But there is no time for more
A knock on the door
The crash of a hammer
He is coming
He is coming
He is coming for

Rejoice, ye righteous;
And shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart
For all will be well, will be well
Will be well
And those who follow the path of the righteous
Shall have their reward
But if they fall as Lucifer fell
The flame
The sword!

All will be, will be well
Will be well
In hell

I will present no defense
Justice has already pronounced its decree
And with anguished cry has cut loose my cord
"Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee from this for ever."

But I am sorry.

A light
A hand
A gesture
A curtain torn
The heavens rent asunder

The clock is frozen
Black is white
And white is my shame
I am waiting
Waiting
For a judgement that never came

am i satisfied with life?

This is kind of amusing. I'm considering becoming an honourary Buddhist (this survey seems to be telling me that I'd do well). Or maybe I'm just being decieved by the D&D stat-sheet that seems to use highly druidic attribute names. At any rate, I stole this quiz site from Val, who stole it from Heidi, who has an inexplicable knack for finding these things.

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	8.7
Mind:	9.3
Body:	8.8
Spirit:	9.2
Friends/Family:	5
Love:	8.5
Finance:	4.8
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

Which brings me to the greater question: AM I SATISFIED WITH LIFE? Below is an attempt to paraphrase the ensuing thought-experiment, in which I came to a decisive conclusion:

"Am I satisfied with life?"
"Yes."

Then I thought about it a little more, and I came to my secondary conclusion:

"But it doesn't really matter, because I'm not living life to be satisfied."
"Am I sure about that?"

I pondered over it some more. Then I postulated:

"Well, I know what wanting to be satisfied feels like -- it's that feeling I get whenever I do schoolwork, you know, that persistent, ultra-demanding, compulsively obsessive feeling that pushes me like a slave until I've perfected everything that can be perfected, all for the sake of producing something really good."

My life wasn't like that, I realized. It was more like this:

"When I do schoolwork, I set my own standard, which is usually the highest that I can accomplish, and then I avidly and fanatically pursue my objective as if nothing else matters. In life, it's different; it's more of a process of refinement than it is a process of accomplishment. So, yes, I know I'm far from perfect, and I know I need to change, but I'm not a Nazi about it. I try to change, not to become the person I wish I was, but to become the person I know I should be."

That last point was something worth mulling a bit more over:

"I'm not unhappy with where I am because I don't wish that I were something I'm not. It's unbelievably pointless to wish to be something else anyways; even if I could change, I'd be throwing my former life away, essentially akin to suicide -- there'd be no point in having a life at all. The whole idea of life, I think, is to see the beauty, the love, the God, in the midst of all of the confusion and the depression. After all, that's the story of all of creation: finding God in the darkness and returning to him. It's the reason I'm here, it's the reason anyone's here, it's the divinely led direction of the entire frickin' universe. And that's what motivates me to change without making me hate my life."

There was one, final point that needed to be addressed:

"That really did become a one-sided conversation, didn't it?"
"Yes, it did."

failure to communicate

It really does feel like I'm flooring the gas in neutral right now, that my life is being defined every day as what I potentially could be doing rather than what I currently am doing.

Allow me to explain further:

"Growing up" in a small, bordered, human sort of way has meant that suddenly, and now as a young adult rather than a rebellious teenager, I've been faced by superficial expectations of competence and maturity that've determined whether I live or die in this new and much harsher social environment (cleverly modeled after the corporate business offices of the contemporary world and, by large and abstract extension, the United Nations). It's meant stepping into new clothes, a new educational institution, new circles of friends, a new perspective on life and politics, new mannerisms and new attitudes. It's meant, essentially, doing everything I can to change my exterior in order to convince myself and others that I've actually changed.

And judging by how different I am now than I was then, I'd say that I've been quite successful. Expendable money has come into my possession; I've gone from not reading to being able to quote from Shakespeare, Chaucer, T.E. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot; I've gone from writing crap to writing thoughtful, provocative crap; I've expanded my wardrobe to include what was once, for the sake of social structure, accessible only to the rich and the old; I've gone from eating out only with parents to dabbling casually in high-class cuisine; I've gone from being musically closed-minded to being musically elitist. I now wear a watch, I've cut my hair, and I go to classes. I wear scarves. I've switched from a juvenile backpack to a sleek, stylish messenger bag. I'm a centimeter taller. I even became a Conservative (if only to show the world that I'm still capable of independent thought, since I can't do anything with my political opinions). AND NOW AND THEN I MOCK-SWEAR AND/OR USE REFINED, OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE, ALL IN THE F-CKING NAME OF ART.

Meanwhile, I've become a judgemental, prejudicial, self-absorbed, self-elevating, self-righteous, hypocritical, pretentious, conniving, contemptuous, proud, wasteful, inconsiderate, competitive, boastful, critical, narrow-minded, unloving liar. All the things I tried to surround myself with in a desperate attempt to build some kind of identity have been empty, meaningless lies.

I have, along with my Western ideals of social acceptability in the adult world, reduced myself from a pathetic, naive, ignorant, and genuine teenager into a collection of easily identified attributes on a resume. I was alive then, but am nothing now. I fell into the trap that I was criticizing everyone else for falling into. I am nothing now. I don't even have the words left to articulate what I'm feeling in some kind of a poetic, memorable manner (and so this post will probably suffer from just as many uncommented comments as the last one).

All I have left is this confession. I'm sorry for making myself out to be what I wasn't. I'm thankful for the scant handful of people who I was able to be real with. I guess this is what it means to grow up.

heaven's song

Like thunder in the sky, the mighty voices of the angels roared in the vaulted ceiling above me. The floor beneath my feet shook as their strange tongue rose in definite, harmonious unison. Their words were, to my ears, foreign and incomprehensible; and yet I knew their meaning with absolute certainty. Concealed as they were from me, their sanctuary hidden beyond a doorway that I dared not look into, the light of their holiness still seeped through the cracks in the walls and scorched impressions on the backs of my eyes. The bittersweet aroma of burning incense washed over me, surrounding me; and the angelic chorus, as if cued, soared out into a new melody, causing my very bones to tremble at the sound, that deafening swell of pitch and volume, unhindered as it was by any mortal bounds.

The crash of a heavy door closing tore through the great choir of voices. With no hesitation their song came to an abrupt end, lingering only in the diminishing echoes of stone walls that refused to be silenced. Then all seemed to hold still as though the air itself stood poised, to flee at the slightest indication of danger. And I, eager to dwell in the beauty of the angels' music again, if only for a moment longer, sat in stone-still stasis, my muscles tense, my heart racing. Yet after some time it became apparent that no length of silence could move that heavenly ensemble to resume its song, and the trembling that had shaken my bones but a minute earlier now seized my entire body as I wept at the thought of the angelic host being driven away.

I could not know how much time had passed. For a duration of it, the minute crash of tears shattering across the hard floor had been the only sound to accompany the drumming of my heart, but now the halls bustled with activity. Busy shoes clapped their vain applause in the arched corridors; a piercing whistle held an errant, struggling tune, complementing the whine of an unoiled door hinge. And ever more did the muddled cacophony of distant words, straining to be heard over the dissonance that surrounded it, grow louder and more raucous, its meanings and its subtleties lost in a sea of confusion.

A cry -- a holler -- an unguarded secret tossed into the careless distance between the worst of friends, and now my senses focused. Here and there I caught a sentence, a movement, a gesture; and my mind turned to satiating its own intense curiosity. The hypocrite berated another for his actions; the liar hid behind a wall of deceptions; the pathetic groaned about the state of nothing and everything; and all along I observed, noting, commenting, taking my own part in their sickly, twisted drama. One familiar voice stood out, an acquaintance, on whose words I began to listen.

And it was then that I caught the scent of incense still enveloping the air around me. My downcast eyes were drawn up to the stone wall of the tabernacle, and there, in the midst of the chaos, I recognized the mighty chorus rise up above the throng; yet even as I heard them, the discordant noise around me grew louder still, as if it dared to challenge Heaven's song. "Pape, pape aleppe!" a hoarse, growling voice clucked nearby, causing every hair on my body to rise, and the shuffle of shoes became a stampeding roar -- but ever more was the angels' song audible, clear, a beacon through the thick fog. I reeled, my mind and my senses lost, and could only in the vaguest memory recall myself standing and stumbling towards the open doorway of the sanctuary.

stop it

(the following is an expansion on a former post)

When was the last time you stared blankly at the ceiling and thought to yourself that you more or less had nothing going for you? Come on, give this a try and count back the hours. Shouldn't take you too far, should it?

When was the last time you found yourself wallowing in someone else's pity? When was the last time you filled your blog with reiterations of the basic theme of "Life sucks and I hate it", or the last time you paraded yourself around with the death mask of depression for a face? When was the last time you publicized the cruel debacle of your life with the hopes of getting someone's -- anyone's -- sympathy or attention?

And while we're on the topic, when was the last time you were feeding on your own pity? When was the last time you looked at your life and at the situation you were in and felt sorry for yourself?

GET OVER YOURSELF.

You probably saw that one coming. Let me explain, before you close this window. It's actually understandable that you've felt this way, or that you continue to feel this way, or that you will feel this way in the future. Why? Because we "are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep" (also known as 21st-century atheology); because our days on this ugly rock of a planet are numbered, and our window of opportunity could slam shut at any given moment; because we want to live life and feel good about it afterwards; and because all of these expectations amount to a whole lot of disappointment when life doesn't go our way. Strangely, it still amounts to disappointment even when life does go our way -- and it seems that this has more to do with the fact that there's a part of us that enjoys being disappointed (understandably, again, since it means that for once we're the ones being let down, instead of the far-too-frequent inverse situation).

When these two root causes -- or maybe the desire to be disappointed precedes the tendency to be disappointed? it's a question worth investing millions in -- come together in that repulsive form that we will henceforth identify as "Unsatisfied Man" (also known as ourselves, or the 21-st century atheologian), the result is what we see all around us. And not just in our friends and peers and enemies, either. The infectious disease of self-depression has permeated every level of our existence, up to the television we watch and the music we listen to and the car that we do or don't drive and the job that we do or don't have and the fact that no matter how high you climb, there's always someone above you. And yeah, that tends to happen when the thing you're climbing on is more or less spherical.

Is it necessary for us to be so negative? No, I wouldn't say so. Why? Because if you're reading this right now, that's an indication of four key things: first, that you're not blind; second, that you're literate; third, that you have internet access; and, fourth and most importantly, that you're alive. "Count your blessings," they used to say, and it makes a lot of sense -- especially when you're complaining about how you don't have any good friends while the very fact that you have food to eat means that you've got something nearly a billion other people around the world don't. And if you're getting sick of my feeding you statistics about starving people, keep on reading and you might understand why.

Then again, everything is relative. Maybe lacking intimate friendships is to us as pressing an issue as having food is to others. Is it possible, then, that our negativity is justified?

... um, no. Not everything is relative. Our inability to recognize the worth of our relationships doesn't outweigh a basic necessity of life. There's really no way to excuse this kind of pseudo-masochistic emotional manipulation, no matter what angle you take on it. Reality is reality; no matter what kind of crap you're in, you've got nothing to complain about.

And what's the sense in making more trouble for yourself, anyways? What do you gain by making your life out to be more miserable than it is? There's a family of psychological conditions known as "factitious disorders", one of which bears an eerie resemblance to exactly this scenario. It's called Munchausen syndrome, and it involves the faking or self-inducement of symptoms of medical conditions to get attention and sympathy. So maybe AIDS victims and Hurricane Katrina and the aforementioned starving people have been getting a little too much of the spotlight (hence your disdain with yet another statistic quoted by yet another brainless idealist who pretends to care for nothing but social justice). Maybe you'd appreciate a little bit of that recognition now and then. Maybe the pity would feel a little comforting when things get lonely.

Well, I sure do hope that either you'll stop trying or that everyone else who listens to you will stop buying into it. It's ridiculous. It's garbage. It's a male cow, pluralized, with "hit" for a suffix (there's morphology for you). And when you've realized how much of a waste of time it is to sit around moping and hoping that life gets better, try this: appreciate. Really, it's an easy concept. All you've got to do is to stop trying to convince yourself that you're entitled to things, because you actually aren't. Try it out, and I guarantee that it'll make life a more pleasant experience for all of us.

what it is to be blind

Life is beautiful.

Really, it is; I'm not just saying that for the sake of having a catchy one-line hook. Life is absolutely beautiful. And I don't mean the sunsets at your cottage or the stars in the sky on some summer retreat or the trees outside your house or the wonderful friends you have at school (although any and all of those things might very well be beautiful). The fact that you're alive, that you're breathing, that blood is flowing in your veins, that thoughts and feelings and sensations are forming in your mind -- that's beautiful. And that's the kind of beautiful I'm talking about.

After all, it's really, really easy to acknowledge beauty in externally beautiful things. How do you think all of those images of friends and cars and girls and tropical islands wound up as your desktop wallpaper? It was because something about them -- some inexplicable but undeniably beautiful quality -- drew you towards them, drew you to attach yourself to them. Maybe it was how they represented a goal you hoped to achieve, or maybe it was their association with good memories. Maybe they were just eye candy. But in any case, you saw what was captured in those images as beautiful, and you were captivated by it.

But it's more of a challenge to be captivated by the beauty in the immaterial. It's difficult to appreciate the fact that you have hands, or that you can smell flowers, or that your parents love you, or that you might actually live to see the turn of the next century, or that you hopefully won't live to see the turn of the century after that, or that you can and do wear clothes, or that you can and do have emotions and can feel angry at some times and happy at others, or that your relationships with other people are such that you can be made angry and happy by the same person and still expect the friendship to last, or that in some distant time someone determined a theology that you found suitable and applicable to your own life, or that in some distant time the world and the human race began, or that in some distant time a Jew was hammered to a block of wood on your behalf, or that in some distant time the world will crumble into oblivion.

Sunsets and sports cars are just somehow more attractive.

the hypocritic oath

There are two truths that can be stated about Christianity in the 21st century: first, that it's the most hated religion in the known world, and second, that it's the easiest to ascribe to. Technically speaking, there's nothing stopping you from "being a Christian" if you feel like it, after all -- no rituals to attend, no special clothing to wear (according to some modern-day movements, you don't even have to wear clothes at all), no religious icons to purchase, no one to declare your newfound status to. And, seeing as the message of the cross was always one of all-inclusive, non-judgemental salvation, it seems to make some sense.

Hence our general attitude of taking people "at their word" when it comes to matters of faith. I mean, who are we to judge or speculate on what we can't see or understand? Every person has his own story to tell; every person has his own path to God.

That must be such a comforting thought for you. No matter how things look on the inside, you can keep your exterior looking picture-perfect, and no one can say anything about you. It's an almost idiotically foolproof way to fool an almost idiotically foolable system, comparable only to assuming false identities on the internet. I'll bet you've even used it in defense of yourself in the past, when you felt offended by someone who pointed out what they thought was a spiritual shortcoming in your character. "Who are you to judge me?" you must've roared out, angrily, passionately, before storming off to another group of people who would truly accept you for who you were, only to turn around and yell, "Hypocrite!"

I mean, who is anyone else to tell you how to live your life, or tell you what you're doing wrong? Especially the people who are so obviously not doing as well as you are? Only you know how you're doing with God. And we all know that none of us are perfect anyways, so of course there are going to be problems and there are going to be issues. You don't pretend not to have any (probably). But that doesn't change the fact that you have a right not to be judged -- that, in fact, they're the ones who are in the wrong for judging you! Just like that verse! Where is it? Damnit, if only you'd been listening in Sunday school. It must be somewhere around here. Wow, your bible is so worn, the mark of a true believer! Ah, there it is. "Judge not, that you be not judged." Matthew 7:1. See? You even know your scripture. You're a perfectly fine Christian.

Such a comforting thought.

I have two words for you: grow up. Take criticism when you need to. When do you need to? Right now, and every waking moment of your life from now until the day you die, unless you somehow figure out a way to spend every waking moment of your life in godly obedience to his will, which is impossible, to say the least. You aren't perfect, and your ideas aren't always better than everyone else's. Suck up your pride and your short-sightedness and try focusing on more important things in life and faith, like life, or faith.

For those of you who love to twist your Christianity out of shape and out of form into whatever wretched foundation suits your compromising morals, I really hope you understand what you're doing -- not to yourself, but to the countless innocent souls around you being ravaged and defiled by your consumerism, your self-image, your "talents" and how you showcase them, your self-righteousness, your boasting, your lying, your legally unacceptable thefts (like shoplifting), your legally acceptable thefts (like downloading music), your insulting and mockeries of both distant figures and your own friends and peers, your competitiveness, your arrogance, your attempted snobbism, your incessant flirting under the cloak of "friendship", your selfishness, your back-stabbing, your anti-Americanism, your anti-institutionalism, your anti-everything-ism, and your pretentious, two-faced approach to life in general.

We're all in the same boat. We all swore to the same hypocritic oath the second we thought to ourselves that we were somehow different, that we were somehow better than the rest of mankind. Because that's really what Christianity does to you after a while, isn't it? Righteousness turns into selfrighteousness, humbleness to pridefulness, love to hate. While the glossy outward face sees more and more polishing as time passes, our insides rot away in a cesspool of ignored sin. We become hypocrites, the very thing we so nobly crusade against. It's no wonder the world hates us.

one life...

I'll be taking the initiative to reconstruct my broken soul. I've realized that I can't exactly afford the time to let goodness and morality come to me; if I'm at all to change for the better, then some proactivity is going to be involved. The world is too big and too slow to attend to everyone's needs -- or to anyone's needs, for that matter -- and I don't like the thought of being a consumer anyways. Sitting on my ass with a sponge for a brain, sucking in worthless information from the pages of a book or the paragraphs of a web site or the melodies of a song or the voice from the pulpit, makes me feel like a vegetable or a sunflower. I will therefore find my own answers, and leave the reparation of my heart in the hands of the only two people capable of accomplishing it: myself below and God above.

Not to suggest that I'll ever really get there. And it might seem like a cop-out, to excuse my inevitable failure by pointing out ahead of time that it was impossible to begin with, but it's not. Think of it as brutal honesty. I'm still going to try, though, and in a lot of ways that's the most -- and the least -- that I can do.

I still wish I knew entirely what all of this self-refinement entailed. It's a bit of a bizarre concept, trying in vain to accomplish what can never really be done. Will I stop somewhere along the line? Maybe when the life I'm living looks, to my stark-naked eye, to fit seamlessly with the life I'm trying to live, I will. Then again, who am I trying to kid? Science and skepticism are paramount these days, and someone's bound to have a microscope at hand to prove me wrong.

I've got to admit, even knowing what to work on is a challenge in itself. It's hard enough to accept the onus of fixing problems to begin with, especially when it's so easy to lay the blame on something else. I mean, is it actually my fault that I feel attracted to girls, or is it the fault of the girls who'd pick socks over pants and gloves over shirts if they had to choose? How can I be blamed for people dying in Africa if five billion others aren't doing a thing about it either? Do I not delve deep enough in my spirituality, or does the church not immerse me as much as it should? It's a familiar song we all like to sing, with variations on the same themes: "If I was raised like this, I can't help it if all I care about are marks and money. I was the one who was wronged, not the one who did the wronging; the ball's not in my court. It's not my responsibility to set things right, and so long as things stay the way they are, I'm totally justified in feeling the way I do."

Is it getting better, or do you feel the same?
Will it make it easier on you,
Now you've got someone to blame?

I've come to accept that I'll never be able to dodge the responsibility for this sort of action. After all, if God and I are the only ones able to determine the course of my life, then how can anyone else be directly involved? I've got myself and only myself to thank for the condition of my heart, good or bad. Actually, the way I see things, I thank God when it's good and thank myself when it's not. And please, be astute enough to note that I'm talking about my heart, not my life. I don't care if my life "sucks". I don't even know what the hell that means. If I'm alive, I'm glad, because I have something that six million Jews couldn't, and would've wanted. If I'm not, then I'm dead, and I'm still relatively thankful because I have something that six million politicians' wives couldn't, and would've wanted. I'm not going to complain if I have nothing to complain about.

All this thinking has to lead in a positive direction. I'm hoping it does. But I'm not trying to find some kind of ultimate answer. Soul-searching is a smart thing to do, but there's a limit to how far you can go. There needs to be, on some level, a recognition of the separate and entirely incomprehensible nature of spirituality, and an acceptance of the fact that in the end, you can never really find what you're looking for. Some questions just don't have answers.

What am I trying to say? Well, this, exactly, as brought to my attention by a very smart and pretty girl:

"Since God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never find him through human wisdom, he has used our foolish preaching to save all who believe."

A logical impossibility? It most definitely is. But I think, from the moment I realized that I'd been born into a loving family in a world full of hate and conflict and suffering and cruelty, I'd already acknowledged that life wasn't exactly meant to make sense -- it was meant to be lived. I can't make sense of the bigger picture, and this isn't an attempt to decipher some higher purpose. I'm here and alive so that I can experience, not rationalize.

Transfiguration. That's what I'm after. That I would change, not just because I'm not happy with myself, but because I'll make someone else happy when I do. The conditions? There aren't any, save for a beautiful five-letter word called "grace" that makes it impossible for me to fail. When I screw up, nothing changes. The price? Everything I never wanted to have.