Karma

Before you ask, this isn’t some hippie attack on the material culture.
I couldn’t bother myself to go that far with it, or to get that negative about it. Just couldn’t be bothered.
It’s just that lately, as I’ve been about to move out for the first time ever, I’ve been going through a bunch of stuff that I’ve had for years. Some of it was in such a state that it had to be thrown a way. A large amount of it could probably go to goodwill, but some of it I just had to keep, because it still meant something to me. I know eventually I’ll be able to just toss it all out the window and keep the memories, but not yet. Now, hold that thought.
On a completely unrelated mindtrack, I was thinking about Christmas as I walked from the parking garage to work today. I’m not sure why. But I was thinking to myself how a lot of really intelligent people condemn Christmas because it has become a purely secular holiday, revolving around people buying each other crap they don’t need in order to try and alleviate some weird media-imposed guilt. Which is true - for a large part. But that doesn’t mean it means nothing to people. And I think that’s where those people drop their argument. Beyond their condemnation of mass marketing, any counter-argument comes across as nothing but cheesy emotional excuses for its existence as such. I feel personally insulted when people assume that I participate in christmas because I am obligated by the media to do so.
I know that for a lot of people, that’s how it is. And you can kind of tell by the things that they go out and buy for people how well they know the person and just how important it really is. Would I be disappointed if I didn’t get presents? Hell yeah, I put a lot of thought into what I ask for. I get stuff I use. But if there were no more presents ever, would I think that Christmas was gone? No. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the “spirit of christmas” or even any religious elements. The attachments I have to the christmas, easter, valentines day, all that crap - they have nothing to do with all the corporate lauding. I would still decorate a tree, because that’s one of the most fun things to do all year. Same with eggs, because I’m an artist and my mother and I go all out… and it’s always fun trying to find them in the morning because she forgets where she hid them. Valentine’s day? I like chocolate. Yep, that’s all. No cheesy romantic stuff, my boyfriend isn’t obligated to buy me anything, I have never required myself to have one by that particular day, and my mom buys me all the sugar.
I could boycott the holidays, teach the media a lesson like some people do. But I already refrain from buying the pointless crap. And you know what? It doesn’t go away. It never will until everyone stops buying it, and with the large number of underinformed, brainwashed citizens in the country that believe they are making good purchasing decisions, that is not going to happen in my lifetime. And sure, I could work at organizing people and telling them not to buy it either, but not if they really thought it was what they wanted. Not everyone can give up their material ties so easily. Hell, I couldn’t get rid of half of that sentimental stuff that I found. Now my friend is Taoist. The last thing that this friend of mine wants is more junk, and after the last move, a lot of that same kind of memorabilia was done away with. My point is, we are all on different levels. It so happens that most of the country is at the level where they feel the need to purchase and hold on to things like that for no good reason until they come to the realization years later that they never needed it to begin with. Furthermore, there is the problem of what can even be categorized as “useless shit,” and until everyone agrees on that point, we cannot compeltely stop buying it. That’s how our commercial nation works. And it isn’t just going to break down overnight. It may be slowly decaying, but the keyword is slowly.
So people can go ahead and keep ranting about it in their “blogs”, just like this. They can either dribble on in some broken, misspelled variant of internet english about all the stuff they didn’t get, or curse antagonistically the fact that they never had a happy holiday because of domestic issues and use that to argue that no one needs it, period. It will be done intelligently. Many will agree with them. But listening to anything like that religiously is just as ridiculous as buying meaningless plastic on sight from an infomercial.
That can’t be stopped either. I can’t even tell anyone to give up the argument.
By no means am I being nihilistic here. One shouldn’t do or not do a thing simply because “it doesn’t matter anyway.” I celebrate christmas not because it doesn’t matter in the long run, but because it has personal value for me. Maybe that’s cheesy. But like I said before, it’s all internalized, and there’s no real way to turn everyone at once from complete externalization of self-worth.
Just a thought. Do with it whatever you like.

Socks don’t get very much attention.

Sure there are a good number of people out there with sock fetishes. But that’s a different kind of attention. I’m talking a true appreciation. The kind that so many girls nowadays have for a cute, comfy pair of shoes, wherein socks are not always such an element of necessity.

And there’s so much to be loved! There are many varieties of socks - toe socks, tabi socks, ankle-socks and half-socks; thigh-highs, knee-highs, tube socks and long socks that scrunch. There are ones with stripes, spots, swirls, tie-dye, and just plain solid colours. They can be made out of anything from nylon to cotton to wool or even angora (mmm), not to mention that impossibly soft fluffy stuff that makes your feet feel like you just put clouds on them. And you can never own too many.
Plus, they are surprisingly versatile. A pair of socks with a hole in them gets a good washing, a snip at the foot, and you’ve got a new pair of arm-warmers (a la Kagerou, for those of you that have read it!). Not to mention that with all the different kind of socks that exist, they are a great way of expressing yourself. Sometimes just knowing that you’ve got a rad pair of socks on under a mundane pair of work pants can brighten your day.

At any rate, one’s feet should be treated with great kindness and respect. After all, one does walk on them all day. Heck, even if you don’t, all you people in wheelchairs and such might just as well dress up those feet of yours too, so they don’t get bored. So why not put a little thought into your socks?

Socks generally get the “you don’t know what you got ’till it’s gone” kind of love. The kind where you wake up one morning, realize you haven’t done any laundry for a bit, and you don’t have any socks left — or that there’s only one of your best pair, because the sock gnomes behind the dryer made away in the night with the other some time last week.

But there are a few people who know their socks, and here are some of them. Replete with accessories and items that are merely sock-related, they not only keep a unique and vibrant array of socks available (I found things here that I had been seeking for a long time, and which could not be found anywhere else), but they also have a little bit of more specific info on each kind, because they check each style out personally when a new kind comes in. They are also very reasonably priced for such high-quality socks. You’ll spend forever just browsing around before you can pick your favourite and get it! Beyond that, they even keep a sock journal, with news, reviews, pictures and other tidbits that updates pretty regularly. If you love socks, check these girls out.

Perhaps this all sounds like a bunch of pointless drivel to you. But maybe tomorrow you’ll take a closer look at your sock drawer. Who knows?

My friend got some bad news yesterday.
Long story short, there are some cells present which, though they appear commonly, have a chance of turning into cancer. For which there is no cure.
As we talked about it, she kept saying “oh well”. And well, I guess that’s it. What more can you say? If it happens it happens, and if it doesn’t it doesn’t. Not to say that one shouldn’t be worried — the thought of it feels like I’ve been hit by a two-ton truck. Or that it should not be fought, if it happens. This wasn’t some kind of super-pacified nihilism.
Because she said to me that even then, she wouldn’t feel as though she were going to die. And I said, if she doesn’t already feel like she’s going to die, why should that have to change?

I don’t know why I take so much notice of these church billboard signs. I don’t go to church. I’m not Christian, and I don’t percieve God in the same manner they do. I am, in fact, of a Bhuddist-Hindu philosophy. But I’m very contemplative, despite context, and am always on a subconscious lookout for concepts to mull over. Things like “Big bang theory? Yeah right! –God” catch my eye now and again.
So this morning on the way to work, after dropping off some of my mum’s heavenly vegetable soup for my best friend (it’s her favourite), I drove by a sign that jumped out at me.
It said, more or less, that prayer was not to give commands to God, but to report for duty.
This challenged my personal perspective.
I have prayed to “God” before, once. I guess I just wanted to see what it was like. It was a warm fuzzy feeling, though uncertain, and of course tinged with that silly feeling that one is talking to oneself about things one already knows. It was the latter that stuck with me, not because I felt stupid for having done it, but because it was true - I was talking to myself. Churches have the strange dichotomy of all at once telling you that God is in everyone, but that “He” is also the master. He is a separate entity. When you speak to him in prayer, you are broadcasting your prayer in a heavenly direction. But what I found, that one night, is that it is simply a further internalization. We pray before we sleep, with what is most important to us weighing on our mind. The comfort of the idea of a God then sends you to sleep with reassurance that someone is giving thought to your problems, your dilemmas. And sometimes it happens, miraculously, that you wake up in the morning and you come to some kind of conclusion, though you can’t explain why. You dreamt something? Or maybe you don’t even remember your dream.
I talk to myself all the time. Driving in my car, falling asleep at night, both silently and out loud. The same thing has happened to me, some strange resolution, realization, or epiphany has come to me, though I have no heavenly agent to which I can attribute its coming. It is of the same nature.
“Prayer” is not for giving commands to God, no. But it is not for recieving them, either. It is for putting those thoughts of yours out in the open. Telling yourself and whatever is floating in the air around you what you are worried about, what you are thankful for, or what you hope will happen, works the same way as it does when you sometimes write something down to remember it and the act of writing it causes you to memorize it. It is now manifest as one assumes God to be. And there it remains, in your subconscious, which processes these thoughts in the background more than you may realize at the time. Is this “God?”
All I had intended to say, initially, was that no one can tell you how to “pray”. But the more I bounced it off of myself in the car on the way here, the more I thought of. All this in a ten-minute drive to work? I’ve got a lifetime ahead of me! This ought to be fun.

By the way, we don’t give nearly enough credit to gnomes.
They have captured a great number of our socks, an incredible feat as almost none of us have ever caught one in the act. They stow things away from where we have set them right before our own eyes, completely undetected. Things that were in the closet have somehow disappeared — at their hands. And, they operate elevators.
There’s an “Elevator Closet” right next to the basement lift here where I work. I press the button to go up, and a great din of clicking and whirring emanates from behind the heavy, securely locked blue door. Behind it, a great number of gnomes are pulling levers and pushing buttons. It takes quite a team of them, as gnomes are rather small and eleveators as you know are giant, heavy, unwieldy things. An incredible feat.
Not to mention all your missing underpants.

Last week’s installment of church billboard inspiration was one that I didn’t bother to examine. It read, at the time, “A life lived with God is a life of legend.” or something to that effect. I just remember thinking that if they’d used “the Lord” instead, it would have been a rather catchy alliteration. Oh, and for some reason, mental images of the crusades, famous book-burnings, bloody religious “reformations” (the fragmentations of Christianity), and the persecution of the Jews. That too. Although, I think perhaps they were referring to the life of Christ.
But I digress.

On to the product of this our most recent Sunday, a piece that is either hair-raisingly tongue-in-cheek or blithely ignorant of itself. It follows:

THE MASTER KEY TO SUCCESS IS KNOWING THE MASTER.

A light and simple thing if your instinct is to recognize “the master” as being God. And yet, applied on a wider scale, it is a sickening likeness to the old adage “It’s not what you do, it’s who you know.” Worded in this manner, it makes a very bold statement. We live in a country whose barely qualified president is the son of a former president, whose family has ties to major corporations, and such experience verses him only in the elitist strategies which, though effective among businessmen and behind closed doors, were never intended for international relations. And from there down, on it goes: every day, those associated with others in positions of power and wealth climb to the top with less virtue and true intent than those who give all of themselves to achieve what they otherwise have no means to reach.

Ironically, these men may be of faith and religion themselves — keeping close their concept of “the master”.

So, sadly, I cannot refute this statement. But the one thing that gets me about it is this: for one who truly knows “God”, with an understanding and acceptance that it is simply a word for something which surrounds us all, and a true feeling of inner peace with one’s life - what is success to that person? How do you reach such a pure thing if you go in with the intention of finding a quick means to a secular end? It cannot mean what most associate with “success” in the world of work, activities, family structure, self-management. Knowing such a “master” can lead you only to acceptance, and only if you wish to reach it.

Interpret it how you will. It just depends on what you’re after.

In regards to this and this:

It sounds to me as though the question is whether a disregard for time would be damaging to the individual attempting to break away from the matrix, in which case it would only be damaging if the individual had not fully prepared themself for their own decision. If the question is, in fact, whether it would be damaging to the matrix itself in the eyes of others who percieve it, the answer would be entirely based on how many other individuals depend upon a shared reality with the person who has accepted this disregard for time and their own matrix. Using your logical model, this linear structure is, as you said, a web.
Since we are dealing with a consciousness instead of a physical manifestation, if we can accept that there is indeed a collective unconscious that joins these, there is great potiential for chain reaction — and what I would rather call a “breakdown” in the matrix than a destructive element.
From what we have collectively observed, this hasn’t happened, or at least not on a very noticeable scale.
That in itself brings me to the crux of it, because though observation is a physical thing, what we see has a very large impact on our general interpretation and perception. And this is where the observable breakdown begins. People are interdependant, and when we see what happens to the percieved reality of someone who gives up their reliance on “time”, it alerts us to that possibility - so if we can’t handle it, it becomes destructive to our personal matrix. That is a direct effect.
I define the accepted “reality” as the place where our perceptions overlap. So: in order for it to be destructive to this overall impression, it would have to directly affect enough individuals to break a large number of “sections of the web.”
So in short, if the question is to the destruction of the individual’s matrix, the answer is obviously yes, because that is the whole point of the person’s letting go of that dependency - but only compared to what the individual is used to, and so it is ONLY “damage” if the individual is still percieving in the same sense enough to categorize their reality as “damaged” in a bad way. So really, if the person enters into this with the intent of shifting this reality for themselves, it is not damaging to their own matrix! It is merely a shift — meaning that it is only “damaging” to those who rely on that particular individual’s matrix remaining static.
If the question is to the destruction of the shared matrix, which we percieve as the blanket “reality”, then the answer seems to be yes only in the case of a large-scale reaction of direct effect, and then again, only to those who rely on this blanket reality remaining static.
So after all this lengthy babble (which I’m only leaving here so you can see how I got to this point), I think the answer is in the definition of the word “damaging.” To those who can accept the change (which I should hope the initiator of a personal change like that would be able to), it is merely a shift. To those who consider it detrimental, it is indeed a destructive effect.

It is indeed only damaging to those who rely on the matrix in question maintaining a fixed state.

(I must note, “damage” is implied in this entry to be a Bad Thing. This may not always be true, and it may not be how he meant it. I used it this way to emphasize the difference between “damage” and “alteration” to a thing.)

There’s a rather large church not far from my house, on the way to my boyfriend’s. It also happens to be right across from where I spent a horrid year of sixth grade, but that’s not important. The only reason this church is memorable to begin with is because it has one of those large billboards, the kind that other businesses in the area use to post things like "DO YOUR DOORS NEED FIXED? WE HAVE FAST SERVICE" in big, blocky, black plastic letters. Their board has sayings. I think they are supposed to be advice, but sometimes I wonder. Through these, I would suppose, their aim is to advertise themselves to the prospective congregation driving by. So imagine you’re cruising along, and you see something like this: "BE KIND TO YOUR ENEMIES. IT MESSES WITH THEIR HEADS." Kind of ha-ha, right? I liked that one, personally. It’s true, and it’s kinda funny. Good bunch, good sense of humor. So now, imagine you drive past them again the next week and you see this: "CHANGE IS INCONVENIENT, EVEN FOR THE BETTER." ..What? It is? Maybe some people believe this, I don’t know. But it caught me off guard. It wasn’t witty, really, and it didn’t seem like a joke. Was it? It seemed, in fact, outright depressing. What are they trying to tell us? Sometimes change sure does suck. But when it’s for the better, how is that inconvenient? So the change from being "lost" to "seeing the light of God" becomes, by their statement, also inconvenient. And it seems to me that’s more undermining to them than anything else. It occured to me that perhaps they were trying to use reverse psychology to get us to think… in which case, well, it seems to have worked. So now that you know some of the history behind this place (there have been dozens of others, and if I remember other old ones I’ll mention them), let me get on to what I saw yesterday as I cruised down the road and glanced, out of habit, at their sign. It read: "EVEN A DULL PENCIL IS SHARPER THAN THE BRIGHTEST MIND." What is the first thing you think of when you see that? It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, because a pencil is still technically sharper than you. You could be a genius, and it won’t stop anyone stabbing you in the face with a pencil. Lovely. It’s kind of insulting. But in a way that doesn’t even make sense, because who cares if a pencil is physically sharper than you? It doesn’t mean you’re any dumber. It seems to say, in fact, that no matter how smart you are, the brute force of something is still able to penetrate the physical form around that knowledge. Matter over mind? It has been my experience that this is the sore opposite of what most bastions of spirituality will tell you if you seem to be losing your faith. Is this at all in character coming from a church leaderboard? Is this reverse psychology again? Are they making some kind of tongue-in-cheek statement about the new security laws regarding airplane carry-on, and do they mean it as a joke or do they actually think pencils and other stabbity office supplies should generally banned? The only bit of advice I can surely draw from the thing is this: Don’t be a smart-ass, or someone’ll stab you in the brain with a pencil. Possibly God.