Vance asked me last Saturday “are you going to go home and write another status about how your friends redeemed yourselves?” and I was like “what? How can you redeem yourselves again? You already redeemed yourselves once and you haven’t fucked that up yet.” I think at the time I was missing the point. Apparently I know people who legitimately care what I think of them, which is entirely fascinating to me because it happens to be near a time when I’ve finally managed to get over caring so much what other people think of me, at least to the crippling degree I did before (I still fret constantly over stupid things I’ve said and done, I just do my best to not let it affect my behavior) and it’s throwing me for something of a loop.

In the same week I talked to two (2) different people who professed a desire to live a life of hermitage (they also know each other. I am intensely interested in whether or not they have said this to each other and formed some sort of mutual hermit pact.) which I find endlessly fascinating, as these two are people that I think of as being very “cool” and “sociable” because I hear about all sorts of parties and things that they do that I don’t and I feel dumb and a bit jealous. It’s funny that they should mention hermitage to me, because frankly I’ve been there. When I was 14-15-16-17-18 that was all I wanted to do in life. Social interaction was too fucking scary. It took years to get out of that mindset, and those were pretty much years where I didn’t talk to anyone that wasn’t essentially virtual. I was invited to one thing by a crazy guy who I have immense respect for during that time and it was a ton of fun, though it scared the crap out of me at the time.

I’m really not saying “don’t do it, man” or anything, because frankly I think people should experience everything they can. I just feel a bit sad and dumb that they’re just now deciding to pursue this just after I finished realizing how shitty it really was. Plus I feel a bit ironic that they would tell me that they wanted to live a life totally away from people, because that’s essentially what I do.

Maybe I’m just being unrealistic. Mern tells me, though, about all this cool stuff she does with or did for her friends and I feel… well a bunch of stuff. Partly jealous, partly happy, partly some sort of vicarious pleasure in hearing about things that I’d like to think that I would do if I were in that situation. She’s the kind of person who bakes things for people and shows up at their dorms with candy and hugs when they’re sad and cries on the phone for hours when faraway friends have their mothers in the hospital and stuff like that. I just think “wow” most of the time when hearing this.

I tell people that I want to be a prophet, but I tend not to be clear on what exactly I want to be a prophet of (a religion where everyone is fucking everyone else all the time, I said once). I want to be a prophet of peace and love, I suppose. There’s some great words. Jamie Whyte terms them “hooray” words, words you can say and everyone will say “hooray!” like “justice” or “democracy.” They’re words that you can say and everyone in your audience will have a different idea of what it means. And by not elaborating you can avoid alienating some portion of your audience who disagrees with you. It’s a very popular political trick. I’ll go kind of against the grain here and define exactly what I mean by peace and love.

Peace as in the unconditional agreement not to harm other people. Don’t be a dick. On a personal scale, it’s pretty much unavoidable, but on an international scale, it’s downright unforgivable. There is no fucking reason to start a war with another country. There never has been and there never will be. This includes interfering with another country’s governance. Putting economic and political pressure on other nations simply because you don’t trust their motives is schoolyard bullshit and totally inexcusable, especially from nations who spend so much time trumpeting their impressive “freedom.” Fortunately, globalization should cover this. The continued economic and cultural merging of the globe should hopefully result in a relatively homogenous world and (I dare to dream) political stability under a unified world government. Or it will collapse into petty squabbles over resources or fascinating proxy wars between corporations. We’ll see.

Love as in the understanding that every other person is another person; complete with all the same fears, hopes, desires and needs as you. I envision a world where everyone has a friend or three like mern, and everyone does what she does for everyone else. Because being lonely really fucking sucks. Love is about the connections people have to one another, not some mystical ideal, not a single emotion. Love is turning to your fellow man and saying “He too, is me.” It is about turning to your fellow woman and saying “She too, is me.”

I’m not saying everything will be perfect. Far from it. Putting yourself out there and caring how other people think is almost always a risk. Interacting with other people and investing yourself into these interactions is almost always a whirlwind of suck. There will always be relationships that fall through, spurned lovers, cheating, lying, ugly rumors, and so on. I just want no one to be alone in this. Everyone needs a friend like Mern, and they’re only lying to themselves when they say they don’t.

I hate all of this. It scares the living Jesus out of me. (Literally. I renounce Christianity every time someone shouts “boo!” behind my back) I spent my life acting more or less like this song here by Regina Spektor that made me cry so much when I first heard it I tried to go to sleep to make it stop. It just reminded me of how totally lonely I really am. (Yeah yeah, what a fucking pussy loser. Crying over a song he must be a huge fucking faggot. You can say what you like, but I already said it to myself. You’d just be repeating after me. I can outdo Gavin for self-deprecation; I just don’t go on about it.)

ANYWAY. My point is that I spent so long trying to get along without anyone else that I’m just absolutely frightened of opening up to anyone. But I’m not a brain-dead moron like Daniel, and I realize that Opening up is exactly what I need if I am ever going to get out of this horrible funk. If I ever expect anyone to be friends with me, first I’m gonna have to be friends with them, and all. I remember hearing that a lot in elementary school. I still think this just goes to show that you learn everything you really need to learn about the world from Disney movies and kid stories and that just gets fucked up later by reactionary cynicism that declares “Oh ho, that must not be true because it was made for kids” or that ridiculously pervasive lie “It’s not that simple.”

So I am spending all my time trying to not be a hermit, to the best of my ability and tolerance for doing things out of the norm. If you click on my profile there (or take my word for it, if you’re reading this on my blog) I copied and pasted the Meyers-briggs personality thing from some site or other that I consistently get, ENTP. There’s a bit I particularly like that goes “Aside from those two areas, ENTPs tend to be oblivious of the rest of humanity, except as an audience -- good, bad, or potential.” which I find pretty accurate. I hate myself for it, but I’m pretty judgmental of everyone I meet, though I do my best to not let it color my actual actions, I’m polite to everyone regardless of how hideous ore dumb I think they are. That said, it does provide myself with ammunition to argue myself out of making friends with people. Stuff like that. As if the cognitive dissonance wasn’t apparent enough, I more or less love everyone I know. I am annoyingly uninterested in my own activities to the point that I will pretty much drop everything and go help someone else if I really thought it would help.

I dunno, here I am back to talking about myself and making statements that I’ll regret and hate in 3-5 days. I should probably stop here.

I just feel like dicks lately and I wanted to tell no one in particular. Actually I wanted to tell one guy I really respect, but he raincheck’d. Now I’ll feel dumb bringing it up again because I already wrote about it and I variate wildly from assuming everyone reads everything I write to assuming that no one reads anything I write.

Yep, I’m nuts.