No one understands the words that are coming out of your mouth.

Understanding of any kind seems to be in such short supply these days. As an example, I realized recently that I will never be able to understand how anyone could not enjoy reading. I just cannot see it. I take pride in being able to put myself in someone else's shoes, to see their point of view; but I just cannot do it for this one.

I cannot understand how we can all take life in all of it's amazing complexity for granted. Or, how we can take all of the good things in our lives for granted. Is it a shortsightedness common to all people? More common to us as Americans? I believe that as a "people" we do take everything in the world for granted and are amazed that we get bit on the ass every time we overlook the important things.

Maybe the problem lies more with us as individuals. Is there really understanding to be had if we do not even understand ourselves? Can we even begin to try to understand anyone at all if we cannot be honest with ourselves? We lie to ourselves about why we do the things that we do, and I do not understand why. We try to make things more complicated than they already are, and I do not know if it is to impress others, or to convince ourselves that our motivations are not as basic as they actually are. As much as we try to fool ourselves, we seem to do the things we do for the simplest or reasons; we want to happy. You can label it whatever you want, but we all want to be happy.

We spend so much time worrying about the motivations of others, and never really looking at our own. We spend so much time putting road blocks in the way of our happiness. We do not catch it until it is too late, but there is always a point when we decide to either push our motivations, our desires, on others, or we decide to ignore them. Maybe the simplest answer is that we will not understand each other's motives. As we are not the one doing the thinking for the other person, this makes an odd sort of sense.

I feel like I have a pretty good understanding about people, I mean other than the book thing, but that does not mean that I will ever understand everything that there is to know about people. It would almost be disappointing to not be able to learn something new about people, as in that stagnation of thought we would stop learning about ourselves.

To be honest, I am by far the most interesting person that I know. Well, not really. Pretty close to the top though, and moving up like a rocket!

Face Painting

We all desperately need someone to know us, to know who we are, to know everything there is to know about us. Every little thing that makes us who we are. We desperately need someone to find these things out. We want to share it all, but we are so scared of someone actually knowing us, of someone finding out who we think we are. How do you explain something you don't even understand yourself? How, when we are so terrified of how someone will react to us, to us without the masks that we wear everyday? Which is scarier; that someone could know us, or that someone might know how we see ourselves?

I wear a physical costume at work, a disguise(only because I get paid for it!). The thing is though that we all wear disguises, costumes that we put on for people, and we end up wearing different ones for every person in our life. We tailor who we are for each person based on who we think they want or need us to be. Add in that we all know how society says that we should act, we all know what group or stereotype that we have been assigned by the rest of the world. We are, of course, expected to act accordingly. All in our endless need to categorize and label everyone and everything in our world. It would be better if we were just labeled as a person. Nothing more, nothing less. Instead, I am a "book nerd", "movie nerd", "sports nerd", "star wars geek", "dance maniac", "nice guy" and a self-professed "funny man". It is so bad that I actually see myself with these labels attached.

I am a man. I am a son. I am a brother. I am a friend. How about I stick with these. All the other labels are more about my interests than me, boiled down for the lowest common denominator.

Oh, I forgot to add "elitist", "snob" and "asshole" to the labels back there. Oops.

Try not having one

There are no bad days. Things may happen in a day that annoy us, or make us mad, but the day can be neither good nor bad. When we are frustrated with the events in a day, we say that we are having a bad day, when in fact we are choosing to let those events dictate how we are going to feel, how we are going to treat the world. I suppose if you spent your day being tortured you could definitely claim to be having a bad day. Or, if you catch on fire. That will also get you a bad day sticker. At least from me, though at the moment I am all out.

In reality though, there are events and circumstances that can, and most likely will, lead to us being unhappy. Or in other words, having a bad day. Now, we can say that we wasted a day doing something other than what we wanted to be doing. Some might call that a bad day. I personally cannot stand anything that might even remotely be a waste of my time, as it is irreplaceable. Though isn't experiencing anything at all preferable to experiencing nothing? Isn't any day that you have a good one? When compared to having none, aren't they all good? Doesn't the potential that every new day has make every single one of them good days, regardless of whether or not we feel it met that potential?

Rough days, hard days, relaxing days, happy days; these all work and make sense. Bad days; this term takes too much for granted. It makes it easy for us to focus on one or two events and ignore the rest of the day. Having a checklist, a balance sheet of things that have to happen for a day to be good or bad just seems to be a bad idea. I mean every day that I wake up I am still me, still the oldest of four awesome siblings, still my parents son, still the bestest of friends with my friends. Even if I have no more days after this one, none of that will change. All of us have things in our lives to be grateful for, and saying that we are having a bad day makes it seem like we are forgetting those things. As if none of those good things are enough to overcome one day of bad things.

There is also the strong possibility that I am nitpicking over something small, that everyone is entitled to apply whatever label they feel like using. I doubt it though.

I'd like to take a mulligan. You know, a do over.

Our dreams never give up on us, never flit away to another place. We never lose them, but when is it that we lose hope in them? When is it that we redefine them in our head from dream to fantasy? I know that as I have grown older I have become less trusting, more jaded, cynical and unfortunately, less hopeful. We call it growing up, becoming more realistic, or practical. We do what we have to do to survive, to stay comfortable. Most of us never reach our goals, or achieve our dreams. We stop taking the risks that you have to take to get there because we have been hurt, because we've seen others hurt and maybe because we are scared of succeeding almost as much as we are scared of failing. Not trying is not the same as settling, which is actively choosing to accept less than you need. Anyways, no one ever "settles" for their dreams. As if.

When we are kids, we dream so high. Or at least it looks high as we get older and look back on those dreams, after life has attacked those dreams. Clawed at them, torn them down, broken them. When we first dream, they are all attainable, everything is within reach. You can still see that same hope in children, that inability to fear that time will take everything away from us. Or maybe you can even remember it from before you lost it. The question is, can we get it back if we lose it? If yes, than where do we look for it?

For me, I found that hope again in my family and in my friends. The faith they have in me, their belief that I will succeed in anything and everything helps shake the fear off of me. I mean, if everyone thinks that I can do it, that I can make it, than at least we are sharing in the same delusion of grandeur that I am building for myself. I'm not alone with my inability to connect with reality, you are all here with me.

For the moment though, I dream only of a full night of sleep. As this is being posted at 1:51 in the morning, I am obviously going to be disappointed. Oh well. At least I have my stuffed animals and Captain Jack standee.

Plastic blue tumber vs. Holy Grail

Why is the search for someone so all consuming in us? Why are we looking for someone who is "perfect" (those are rock quotes for those in the "know"), who has to match up with all of the different checkpoints that we have for someone in our heads? Isn't it the flaws, the imperfections that make a person interesting? Those flaws are what make us different, what make us individuals. I mean, if we could attain perfection, whatever that might be, wouldn't there be a bunch of people there? The same way that everyone knows someone that got a perfect score on the SAT, everyone would know someone that was perfect.

How could anyone be perfect? The idea itself is insane. As if anyone could ever be everything that everyone wants/needs. I know that I'm not everything that everyone wants. I mean, most do, but not all. I figure that the idea of perfection in a person is a personal thing. One person will have a different version than the next person, and so on. It's when we focus on those specific traits and things that we want that we start to lose the fact that we are dealing with a person, not a grocery list. Most importantly, we forget that what people find interesting and engaging in us, are our flaws and imperfections. We try to hide these things, try to be a different person. I mean, if you are a dork, than that's what is going to do it for you, so stop fighting it. Let the actual you, not the one that you allow people to see on a regular basis, but you be what people meet. If that doesn't work, than screw those people. They are probably an asshole anyway. Better off not knowing them at all.