Is it true that the more selfish you are, the less you enjoy life? And does selfishness only breed selfishness, until people are essentially stuck to themselves?

As I reached toward my mid twenties, the world was expanding for me, and now that I’m coming back down from the middle the world seems to be closing in around me. I trim everything down until I feel I can handle it. Does this signify a need for control and therefore a flaw? Or is this what’s supposed to happen?

If human beings are made of energy, and we can’t die without our energy passing into another form, should we go ahead and spend whatever energy we have, knowing that we can’t use it up?

Why is it that when I feel like I’m helping people, I feel useless, and when I’m making money to support myself, I feel important?

How can I feel hatred toward someone simply because they aren’t doing what I think they should do? Am I insisting on moral absolutes, or am I somehow justifying my own approach to life by judging the rest?

There is a different frame of mind that I find myself in, whenever I think about historic times and cultures. When I put myself in their shoes,. I think of all the things I know that they probably didn’t. I wonder how they got by, and I get the distinct sense that everything that ever mattered to them has been forgotten. and buried underground. But when I think of myself of course I never feel the same pity. No doubt in 100 years some child will hear of the things I once believed and laugh, because I was so obviously wrong. And for some reason, one that I really can’t explain, I’ve begun to actually feel that my whole life, even the present moment, is history.  It seems so far gone – so outdated. It’s the same mindset…  as though I drive a buggy and meet my friends at the saloon for poker, when I’m driving to O’Henry’s for coffee. The only thing in my life that I can tell might be contributing to this is my ever-growing acceptance of all systems as corrupt.  I wish we would dialog less about the Bible being written by imperfect men, and more about the law of the land being written by him too, and upheld by his sons, and perpetuated by corrupted virtues. It’s very odd to feel like my life is expiring right before my eyes. Every day feels like a step toward history, rather than a new tomorrow. I feel like I’m walking backwards in time. What would cause me to feel dead while I’m alive? Some faulty belief system? Some missing hope? Some unseen emptiness around me?

Is it true that the battle of the sexes is the only one that will never end? Is it because everyone has a gender, and thus no one is deemed credible enough to call a truce?

Why can’t I let go of what others think of me? Ever?

Why do I look in the mirror to feel real, then when I look away, feel that my soul is screaming at me that it wants to get out of me?

I am starting to really believe that everything has stopped. Did I cause this? Am I a victim of my own perspective, or the only real friend it has?

Is it capitalism’s fault that I associate self worth with net worth? Or is it a natural inclination, the desire for independence and the need to think literally anything is possible if I work hard enough?

I have loved and lost, and I have been loved and been lost, and I still feel like I’ve never lived or loved. It would seem that love is an answer for many of my petty concerns and insecurities, but that’s impossible for me since I scrutinize flaws in loving just as harshly as I do every other behavior of mine. Can I possibly let go of selfishness and just love, if I’m consistently disappointed in my attempts at loving? Is there nothing I can do to ease this?

Is life just a string of events in which we become more and more shocked at the things we do and the areas where we’re not very strong? Is this the same question I’ve asked for the last 5 years? Am I seeking humility, but then rejecting it when I find it? And who’s going to help me, if I can’t follow all the rules to find someone?

Am I lazy?

You can’t make something ugly into something beautiful. That sounds like a statement that would offend me if someone else said it. When I step outside, I feel an intense nagging in my spirit – the human body in all its forms around me, is begging to be showcased. I can feel the faces of other people imploring the universe that someone would decorate them.

I keep thinking of makeover shows, which have always struck me as closed-minded trend pushers. I feel the same urge to decorate people, and I can’t seem to help it.

I’m not sure, though, that makeover shows approach people with the idea that they are already beautiful. They seem to assume that it is something inherently ugly that begs to be covered up with a couple clean lines and some rouge. In my mind, things work differently.

You can’t make something ugly into something beautiful – and in every single case I can think of, the human body is inherently beautiful, or is the potential energy of beauty. It does not “contain” something beautiful that waits to be revealed and highlighted. It IS beautiful, and I can prove it. Anyone who has ever felt someone else’s body was calling out to be told it was special can already concede the point. How about the fact that the visual body is the only part of you that truly experiences the outside world as well as the inside one. How about the longing to be with someone beautiful? Why do you match your socks?

What I mean is, when I see something ugly, from an artistic point of view, it because that thing gives a message of ugliness for its own specific purpose. Sure, you’ve met people you wouldn’t want to sleep with. But I myself have never met someone whose very visage conveyed something without a spot of beauty.

And that’s one of the best thing about beauty. One splash of it can change an entire scene.

Does your skin have to be perfect? And your makeup flawless, and your shoes and purse matching? There’s a reason that we avoid overkill of beauty. It’s not meant to fill a space, but to accentuate the entire picture. A picture of complete beauty doesn’t really ring true, does it? Flawlessness always seems like a lie – even near-flawlessness. And that’s because beauty js a magical, desirable spice and flavor. It is not a meal.

Yet here we are, in these bodies, splashing our beauty onto this bleak earth, in overwhelming numbers.

To change the pace a little… I myself see hypocrisy in the idea that ugly cannot be made beautiful. On the one hand, ugly is art. It’s all art. Ugly is truth. But just like complete beauty seems like a lie, complete ugliness is hard to find as well. The mistake we make is in believing that ugly is the more powerful factor in an image just because its representations are the most numerous.

Why wouldn’t we feel that way, anyway? The journey to adulthood is really, for many of us, just a slow and deadening process by which we lose our belief in beauty. It all its mystery and power, in all its everlasting victory, and we learn to pity those who hope for beauty and still profess to know it’s at the fingertips of every one of us.

As a feminist, I make the mistake too, of assuming that human nature is the only kind of nature. Forgetting that it is a very special display of a certain kind of love.

My own love affair is with color. When color comes into play, I can’t seem to focus on anything else. I get stuck on small tasks for hours, trying to create beautiful color combinations.

Does color reflect another kind of nature? Sure! It’s so free, yet so governed by immutable laws. And time, another kind of nature. And math, one of my favorite art forms. So limitless, yet so concrete. Therefore, feminist though I am, I love the idea of the human body as an incomparable thing of beauty that can somehow display other natural beauties – and instead of taking away from its own, it highlights it. I love the idea that a green pair of earrings gives my eyes a beauty they didn’t have before. I love that I can cover the pink in my skin with tan, and bring out the whites in my eyes. I love that I can smile, and show a brilliant flash of white that makes the black in my lashes irreplaceable instead of clunky and out of place.

So if I say you can’t make something ugly into something beautiful, it’s because beauty is like what a candle does to a fallen cake. It takes something that was mundane all alone, and turns it into a celebration! I genuinely don’t know if it’s just me that the body calls out to as a canvas does to an artist. It seems that many people have the inclination to highlight those few qualities that stand out, and make good use of the splashes of beauty already at their disposal.

And I really believe the body is the perfect canvas for some of life’s most beautiful qualities, be they points in time, balances of numbers, or color theory’s favorite formulas. Sure, the perspective I hold is little but an angle. Then, I seem to find that my angles work for me quite nicely.

It’s very sweet to think of the way beauty overtakes an entire image. Are we predisposed to look for it? Are we all poets in that way? If ugly were really trying to make a statemtn, don’t worry, it would make it in just a splash too. But in cases where the glass is half full or half empty, individual perspective comes into play. Again, the mistake we make is in believing that because someone took a sip from the glass, that it is only half filled. That’s what makes a a perfectly nice person into someone who only dates skinny girls, or only sleeps with blondes. They have failed to acknowledge the overwhelmingly positive amount of water left. And again, that is what leads to our belief that ugly is just as common as beautiful.

The truth is much more accessible than that.

Does it make anyone else melt a little, to think about Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett as a couple? Here’s a guy who seems pretty rough, and he’s didn’t ever seem to be beautiful – not without his inner man, anyway. Along comes Julia, with all her charisma and intelligence and in my imagination, she just exudes life. *WHAT IS IT* that makes them a couple!? You know? It blows my mind! Until I think about this… There’s no reason beauty and ugly would marry each other. Just like Night and Day never show up to the same party, some things in nature are true opposites. Then I realize that marriages are not made of night and day, but of yin and yang, each of which never really shows up to a party totally independent of the other – arrive in separate cars though they may.

Like I said, beauty is best in splashes. If the glass is half beautiful and half ugly, there’s little poetry – only a choice for the viewer to make – no real truth. Opposites do not balance each other toward peace. Their juxtaposition strikes a chord that one of them is a lie and that the viewer MUST choose.

So 100% of either quality is not appealing to the soul, and neither is an equitable division of the two. And although I don’t believe people are ugly but rather some are blank canvases awaiting a splash of beauty, the perception of others is what makes all the difference between pretty and ugly. Essentially – that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Can you imagine if Lyle and Julia walked into your dinner party together? This idea blows my mind more than the fact that they are together – they find each other appealing. This means that there is some quality in the honesty of Lyle’s imperfection that Julia relates to… she sees herself in there somewhere. And when Lyle sees Julia he feels some of her beauty… he recognizes an honesty of a quality in himself… in her, somewhere. They aren’t 50/50. They are , conservatively, 40/10/40/10, still acknowledging that we aren’t talking about beauty vs. ugly, but the question of how pronounced beauty becomes when paired with the rest of the image on the canvas. What you’ll see is that it doesn’t take much beauty to make the whole thing worthwhile.

That, people, is poetry at its finest. Because now, remember that we the viewers have our poetic eyes peeled, foremost, in search of beauty. The 40 of mundane in Lyle relieves Julia of the obligation to be perfect. It also relieves the viewer, gently, of having to believe that there is such thing as an untainted beauty in humanity. And the 40 of beautiful in Julia makes visible a quality in Lyle we really never would have seen without her: the beauty in him. I mean the physical, visual kind of beauty. To me, that’s some kind of miracle. That’s some kind of life lesson, that the splashes of vibrancy, the reds and oranges of life, are worth all the trouble.

Sadly, I’m a grown up, and the idea of love no longer makes me euphoric. The hope for something beautiful has faded. And when good things happen, I take them in my palm and set them aside as though they don’t really represent my experiences, because they are so small and so infrequent. I can’t cause them or predict them or really explain them. I feel ashamed when they make me happy. I can’t consider them life, can I? At some point between then and now, I’ve accepted the idea that life is a string of awful moments tied together by deserted sections of a canvas.

Maybe my life is Lyle Lovett. It stands alone, with all this potential for beauty, but no one to recognize it. Maybe my body is Lyle. And maybe Lyle will be alone forever.

But I like to think there’s someone to answer that call. If color and form call out to me to bring out just a few pieces of them, and if I’m so tempted to respond that I can practically fall in love, then maybe my life calls out to goodness and virtue, imploring it to decorate just one thing: don’t fill me up; just use my glass for the overflow. Don’t make me over; just bring out my eyes. Don’t give me a mansion and a Rolex; just pay my bills.

When I think of it in those terms, I have to be honest. Life has given me beauty, over and over and over again. More than I need. Yet I insist that I am deprived of it.

You don’t want *too much* – you want splashes. You are interested in a balance, where beauty outweighs everything else.  That is a healthy sense of what properly decorates a life. Beauty does not come in like a flood on top of everything awful. It’s an ant carrying ten times its weight in food. It’s a flashlight under the covers.

When you think of life as I do, it’s easy to see why beauty would be lost. Here you work day in and day out with a puddle of black ink. Come on… you’re going to add a drop or three of red and tell me that makes a difference? Or maybe it’s not accurate to think of it as paint, but as light. Paint is for hiding things. Paint is for unwanted. Oddly, people seem to use it to cover blank spaces a whole lot more than to hide real ugliness… this is what I mean when I say ugly is artful and communicative. Hiding it deprives us of that. What nature abhors, as you might recall, is not a mess, but a vacuum.

There’s no conclusion to this for me right now, except to say that I know beauty is only beautiful when it is held next to something which isn’t… and pure, unadulterated ugly seems pretty hard to find. That you can read a book by the light of a candle, and that somehow that makes even the darkness essential, and the night worth enduring even though you get no rest.

Sorry that’s not a very eloquent ending. I’m just having a thaw of the hope for beauty; it’s kind of like when Belle is in the scary mansion and all of a sudden the footstool is drooling and the teapot is singing. Part of me is going, remember reality, but my mind just keeps saying to it, what if THIS is reality? So… you know, sorry for being confusing again. Goodnight,

A couple immedaite problems with the last post. 1. I compare myself to and put myself on equal footing with God. I didn’t mean to do that, but I can’t think of any religion where that’s considered respectful… and it sat funny with me.

2. I may have incorrectly assessed the relationship of God to people as a marriage. I mean, the hymn says – God our father, Christ our brother. Other theologies may call God an energy or a Mother. The only time Christian texts call God a husband, I think, is as an example when speaking directly to husbands. Euuughhh… I don’t like to talk Bible, let’s move on.

How is the parental relationship different than the spousal one?

To summarize the most obvious difference, the parental relationship is more permanent because of blood ties, but somehow less emotionally intimate. There’s also a subtle implication that the parent will always be the more loving of the two. If a spouse dies, you can bond yourself just as strongly to another one. If Dad dies… your mom might find a person to fill that role. But you probably can’t do that.

I guess it would break down into two schools of thought. And despite myself, I find the parental view more soothing. Whether it’s true or not I couldn’t tell you.

God as a parent feels like a provider, someone who’s got your back even when you’re disrespectful, someone who takes care of your needs when you can’t, who shows off all the macaroni art you made and bursts into tears when you show good character, someone who would have given their life for you the minute they found out you existed, someone who hurts when they have to correct you, someone who’s been through what you’ve been through and sympathizes, and if you disappeared they’d never really move on… I really find comfort in that. That’s probably the school of thought I find most relevant.

God as a spouse, well, that works a little differently and maybe the downsides aren’t any worse, just more obvious. If God were a husband, there isn’t that sense of authority, instead we have a sense of equity. Like I said in the last post, he is just as able as you are to leave the relationship. His decisions would look for mutually beneficial outcomes. You get to help decide what role he plays in the home, and you get to base it upon the role you yourself feel most suited to perform. He trusts you with intimate information, and he needs your encouragement.

If there’s anything interesting about this whole train of thought I’m taking, it is probably the different kinds of jealousy and protectiveness in those relationships.

Every time I walk out the front door, my parents give me warnings. They overestimate the danger of my living without their presence. They’re overprotective, and the exaggeration of that protectiveness comes straight from the huge love they have for me. They never wonder – would she just stop calling us if she found a better family? They only think of outside influences that might steal me from them.

I imagine if I were married, there would be less fear of me dying. I read somewhere that one of the major factors in a good marraige is whether partners view each other as competent individuals. Assuming my husband thinks I’m competent, he isn’t so afraid for me when I take my daily walk to the mailbox. His worry is – will she leave me if she finds someone better? Would I leave her? The marriage relationship has an inherent weakness in it because it has to be built from scratch, by 2 people who have had the most important relationships in their lives simply handed to them at birth. The panic comes in if my husband thinks I’m talking to another man. (My parents wouldn’t feel threatened if I talked to someone else’s parents.) My husband would likely track the guy down and scare the hell out of him. It’s an overreaction, and in an ideal scenario, it comes from love. (It’s worth thinking about that love might really motivate this behavior, whether it reflects other personal flaws – machismo, pride, jealousy - or not.)

I’m getting a little smile out of the fact that you could call the first school of thought a “predestination/sovereign God” approach, and the second one looks more like a “free will” philosophy. Both are loving relationships, they just have different risks and different means. Is it possible that God relates to us in both ways? Or maybe that all kinds of relationships reflect a different perspective of a singular love??

Thinking about jealous reactions, I wonder about the people we know as religious alarmists. (Oh yes, yes I just did, you can’t stop me now!) Maybe it’s not that they want to judge people or pick a fight. Maybe they just feel like someone is disrespecting their parent or their spouse, and it angers them not out of a sense of national moral decay, but a sense of family. Maybe they’re warning you to repent because the end is near, because they have a fierce and crazy love toward mankind. I mean, it kinda makes the whole thing sweet, in a weird way. Sure, it doesn’t feel like the kindness of love, not to us… but kindness is easy when a good relationship is at peace. When it’s threatened, I dare you to see anyone behaving reationally. 

You know, though, what’s funny is that if someone said something unkind about me, or if someone was hitting on me and I didn’t realize it… ideally I’d want the person who loved me to trust me. That means, communicate the situation, and put it back in my hands. If I’m trustworthy, I can seek peace and understanding before I call for reinforcement. I can try to quell extreme emotions on both sides. Does that sound silly? Again, I’m not trying to say – this is what I’d do, so it must be what God would do. I just feel like understanding a little human psychology might clarify the weird shape of the box God seems to be stuck in.

But the least I could do, if that’s what I really feel, is practice what I preach, and let God speak for itself, instead of feeling like I ought to be explainer of all these random thoughts. Luckily, I’m not sure about this stuff, so I’m probably going to keep writing.

Let’s suspend a few ideas. I don’t really ever address the question of evil, so we’re suspending it. And in this, we’re also suspending all the omni’s of the Christian God, and reducing he/she/it to a loving, emotional being that might very well be all the good things we say it is. In the very least, the kind you’d want as a pal.

Oh, also, we’re going to say you’re married to God.

Let’s pretend, in a much more horrifying scenario for you, you’re married to me. When am I happiest? When do I feel I’m getting what I intended out of this marriage?

Is it when you’re worshipping me? I have to say, I hope not. Are you worshipping me because you feel like you have to? Is it because, hey, could be worse. That seems like the kind of respect I’d want – I may not be the best but you could have done worse, so you’re still glad about the whole thing.

OK use your own brain to see where a God might find worship neat, but not the chief aim of being with you.

Back to me. Am I happiest and most satisfied with my marriage when you are doing right by me, and most unhappy when you are doing wrong by me?

Again, I really hope not. It would be pretty obvious I didn’t love you, wouldn’t it. I just love myself, since I’ve made my own power and happiness the central goal of an entire marriage. When you don’t do right by me, I don’t like it. When you do right by me, I do. But that’s a detail. That can’t be a goal.

Go ahead, do the God part now. I’ll wait.

I married you because I want to experience you, and I want to be experienced. I’m under no delusions that you’re somehow trapped in our relationship.

I don’t feel like writing too much tonight. I just want to rule out several popular thoughts about the purpose of God and his love for people. It’s not for his enjoyment alone – because that doesn’t make any sense, it doesn’t work with love.

Marriage is supposed to be a give and take, and it’s supposed to be a lot of ups and downs. It’s easy to blame the other person’s imperfections for all of your misery – even if the other person is perfect. Conversely, it’s my style to take more blame than I ought to, forgetting that other people are competent to interpret my actions without demonizing me. Anyway.

I’ve been perusing my previous writing, and I have come to the conclusion that I am, in no uncertain terms, a juvenile self-important asshat.

Luckily, that doesn’t stop me from getting out of bed at some point after sunrise and possibly lunchtime.

First, what kind of asshat doesn’t edit their writing before they post it? And then, what kind of juvenile person says the same things people have been saying for years, like it’s big news? Not to mention most of these things have already been expounded upon ad nauseum by people far more important than I. Sooooo….

What was the point? Ohhh yes, I’m here to say, I acknolwedge my asshatness but on priciple alone I make little or not apology for it, because I cannot think of anyone I have ever met who was not, in some bold way, a similar type of hat.

Now on to the things that are on my mind. I’m taking a different approach this time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about innocent people. I mean, statistics make it obvious that a ton of innocent people go to jail. That, for some reason, terrifies me more than anything I can think of, including public speaking and bees or even combining those and speaking at a bee convention which would just be awful.

I’ve been doing WAAAY TOO MUCH thinking about the experience of these people, and I’ve ended up in their shoes emotionally, which has given me a fricken miserable week-ish. First, I think about how much like murder it is. But like, a conspiracy to murder, involving the original criminal, previous lawmakers, the family of the victim, everyone on both sides of the lawyers tables, the judge, the jury, and the public at large.

That’s where it gets emotional. Which means I could have had something rather well thought out except that I panic right here. All of a sudden I envision my family (who, in my vision, is basically Rudy Huxtable and some neighbors) hugging it out that I’m going to prison, and wanting to really experience the loss, but knowing that there’s this seed of doubt in their minds – what if she did it? So then they feel unable to call their friends and talk about it because if I’m in jail for something, then people are going to be sure I did something wrong.

Then I picture me. I’m sitting in a cell, right, and no one in prison believes I’m innocent either, because I’m so adamant about it. Which may be too much to assume but fear is making me imagine worst case scenarios.

Now I’ve got all my acquaintances talking smack about me and my family. THEN I’ve got to cope, right? Whatever it is, it’s going to be something I could never imagine having done, so now I’ve got an identity crisis because what my life looks like outside is not what it looks like inside.

I mean I could go on, but can you imagine all the people I’d have to forgive. How helpless I’d feel, and how without hope. Then to think that I can’t get anyone to look for whoever the criminal actually is? And even if they can show I’m innocent, do you know how hard it is to get someone out of jail? And even if I got out, there would always be this label following me, creating suspicion.

So.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my greatest fear in the world is not being trusted.

What if no one trusted me?

I’d be isolated in my entire reality, that’s what.

I know my last few posts have made me look a little (a lot) paranoid schizo looneytown.

But if I don’t think about this stuff, who will? I mean isn’t this kind of an unreachable group of people?

This whole thought process has taken me out of the sense of safety that I had – that if I don’t do anything wrong, I don’t get in trouble. You can’t trust that, man.

Now I have a sense that I am always exposed. That at any time, any nutjob or faulty law could impose itself onto my life. If innocent people are punished, stigmatized, and marginalized then nobody is safe.

And the point is (I always like to say the point because I know I write total nonsense and like the butt that I am, I am again not going to edit before I publish, I’m drunk with power I tell you) that I have become incredibly unsettled over something that does not affect me at all, exists only in potential, and undermines my sense of all that is moral and good.

I could talk about it forever and I’m sure that one day I’ll be able to more poetically and less frantically address this grim issue, but for now my steps are panic, ramble, publish. Yeah it’s embarassing. Publish!