218 this morning. What. The. Hell?
What did I say last week? This takes patience? F*** patience. I want to be thinner, and more attractive, now.
Yet, the holidays... and food. Ugh, such good food.
Last year around the holidays, my gym routine fell off dramatically, for a number of reasons. Change of schedule was one reason. Illness was another. It was a challenging time, and took me a bit of course in this whole health thing. I'm probably still trying to lose what I gained then. So I have to settle myself, no matter how crazy the next month gets - and it WILL be crazy, I cannot neglect this part of my life.
On Another Note...
I wasn't going to post this today. I can't decide if it's important, or just the pathetic complaints of my depression. But, here it is. You can decide.
We went to see Bohemian Rhapsody on Sunday afternoon, since we finally had a day where neither of us had stacks of commitments. The movie was as amazing as I thought it was going to be. Queen was one of my favorite bands in my youth. I enjoyed the different. Kiss was another example - different, although more gimmicky. My 7-year old brain didn't register gimmicky. Queen seemed different in different ways though, even to a naïve mind.
Bohemian Rhapsody emphasized why Queen was different.
"Misfits who don't belong together, we're playing for the other misfits. They're the outcasts, right at the back of the room. We're pretty sure they don't belong either. We belong to them." Good description by Freddie Mercury of their band when they were trying to sign their first record deal. I felt like one of those misfits. I still do. Maybe that is why their music spoke to me.
The music I enjoy is usually something more than what I can hear, but rather, music that I feel. I often have emotional responses to what I listen to, and I'm not afraid to experience emotions. In fact, I seek it. Probably more than most people understand. This life, my life, the experience of me as a human would be flat, and unmanageable without deep emotions, or should I say, even more unmanageable than it is with them. I seek those emotions everywhere: in my music, the books I read, the movies I watch, the art I create, and especially in the relationships I have with others.
Be The Artist.
I have to be the artist. No one considers me to be art.
The movie held more emotion for me than I was even expecting, or could have prepared for. Overwhelming levels of emotion, even reflecting on it days later. For some reason, this isn't something that I can identify straight away. I'm usually pretty good at identifying my emotions, where they stem from, and why I feel them, but in this case I have to reflect on it more, and probably when I'm not feeling so much all at once.
Further addling my mind were the dreams I had the night after. Horrifying in my estimation. No, not horror movie, life or death, or even physical struggle types of dreams. Horrifying from the aspect of my raging emotions. Adding to them, and igniting new feelings of uncertainty, emotional distress, and anguish. Things I work so hard at in life, visualized as just slipping away in such uncontrollable ways, and the failures that I endure practically being shoved in my face, mockingly, as if the universe is trying to say, "See? It's not worth it. You'll never be enough for anything, or anyone."
I'll always be better behind the camera than in front of it, behind the scenes, making things happen from the back of the room, and remaining unnoticed. But even in the life of Freddie Mercury, even achieving grand stardom, becoming a household name, creating music celebrated by millions, selling out arena, after arena for years, he was still more the sum of what he could do for people rather than who he was to people, and he knew it. He struggled against it. He lacked his own self-assurance because he knew the minute he wasn't perfect, those people would abandon him.
The things I've learned in my life: if I don't want to face rejection, stay in the back of the room, and don't hold on to any expectations. Making that first contact is just a step toward rejection - people in general will only seek me when I can do something for them. Flaws aren't accepted, nor tolerated.
As I move through life these things become more, and more apparent, and thus, harder, and harder to fight against.
Just To Stay on the Depressive Side
On Twitter someone asked the question, if you had to explain death to a 3-year old, how would you do it? The question was asked in the context of a religion/atheism debate, leaning toward the suggestion that you can't explain death in a way kids can get their minds around without adding in some theological fairy tale.
One response asked, which theological lie would you tell? There are many theological ideas as to what happens after death, and none of them have been proven to be any more true than another. So why lie to your child, as opposed to just explaining how after you die, your atoms are spread back into the Earth and new life grows from what you once were?
The shoot-back on that of course was, how does a young mind contemplate death, or even, how often do you contemplate your own death, if that is so easy to understand?
No one said it is easy to understand. Death isn't easy to understand from the point of view of your consciousness, but it is pretty easy to understand from a chemical/physical science. You die, you rot, your rot feeds new life. That is the cycle of life on this planet.
Consciously, no religious idea has ever provided comfort to me over death. I contemplate my own death probably with enough frequency to make it creepy to others, or perhaps warrant a psychological evaluation. It's a pretty big life event, and an unavoidable one. That's the first part of getting your mind around it. Accepting that you're not going to live forever, and it's ok! You haven't lived forever to this point anyway, at least, not as a conscious mind. However, the atoms in your body have, in one way or another. They might have all be hydrogen at once time, before being baked into heavier elements in the hearts of dying stars, but the atoms that make you what you are have been around for billions of years. That's kind of impressive, even if it is unfathomable to our simple, limited, human minds. You get to be born. You're new once. You age. You die. But what creates you is an eternal thing, and the atoms you now possess will go on into new creations, forever.
It is the consciousness, and sense of self, where people struggle. It is hard to comprehend nothing when you have lived, and experienced so much. Our memories are a footprint in the sand that we don't want to see washed away. The love we share, we don't want to know that those we give it to will somehow be without it. We don't want to be forgotten by the people that we love, or the legacies that we leave. We want to know what happens. We want to see where this crazy humanity thing goes.
We struggle with the unknown. That is our consciousness.
That's why we contrived all of those religious explanations in the first place.
How often do you contemplate your own mortality? What it means to no longer be alive? To part ways with who you are?
What does death mean to you?
I can accept it. Some days, I wouldn't mind a quick ending. Sometimes those days outnumber the others, but they have for a long time now, and... I am still here.
Black Friday? Bah, Humbug.
I find to man people the mere suggestion that Black Friday is a waste of time, and money is akin to saying, "Happy Holidays" to a white, southern evangelist. The Hunger Games style scramble to get all the cheap things that we seem to engage in doesn't entice me, and I know the lower the stores make a price on something, the less chance you'll have getting it, or the more you'll have to endure to get it.
In last week's blog I said I would put on my Facebook page a list of places to shop small, as opposed to risking your life trying to get a bargain. I have been remiss in doing that, as the last week has proved to be very busy. I will get to it sometime in the next couple of days. Although I feel it should go without saying, that you should be more creative, and thoughtful, and shop local, small businesses for your gift giving at the holidays, I know people still get suckered in with those Black Friday, big-box "deals."
Politics
Should I even, today? Eh, a little. I'm already swirling in the funnel.
Final results look as though NY-27 re-elected an indicted criminal, instead of a hard-working, genuinely caring person. That's pretty depressing, and very disappointing. I wonder if Collins will speak at the Lewiston Memorial Day Religious Revival again this year...
Trump claims victory when he lost the House, which is huge, and basically means once they're sworn into office, the House can legitimately stop his ridiculousness, and start to investigate his shadiness. Now we just need the Senate to flip in 2020, and 33% of Americans to stop being disgusting, horrible people. First order of business for those new house democrats though should be investigating, and eliminating the republican gerrymandering, that leaves us in this situation where democrats keep receiving more votes, but losing elections.