Adventures in Zephux

     Lately, I haven’t felt like doing much. My house is a mess and could easily require several hours of cleaning. My yard is almost two feet tall now. My car has water spots because (I do still wash it, because it is my love) I was too lazy to dry it. Nothing at work gets done. I go right home, and watch movies all day… I haven’t even gone grocery shopping, so I’m probably going to starve to death soon. I’ve been in his routine before, and there is a simple explanation for it. A good friend of mine, who was once a girlfriend of mine, recently returned after being gone all summer. And for some reason, when I’m with her… which seems like all time, well is all the time… I can’t get anything else done, I can’t even thing about anything else. I get so incredibly lazy. This happened before for several months while we were dating. And I HATE! not being productive. Absolutely can not stand the idea. It makes me feel like I have been wasting my life. I need to accomplish something and fast. I think I will work on that tonight. I’ll let you know how that goes in a few day. Just thought I would come on here and rant for a bit.

     Well, another week has passed by and still, no decisions have been made. I do, however, have some good news. It appears that the company I co-op with likes me so much that they want to take me on part-time in my off semesters (at my school you co-op ever other semester for two years, adding up to one whole year of work). This means that instead of working in a grocery store or something, I get to keep my cushy and amazing job throughout the other semesters and get to keep cashing those gloriously high paychecks. I asked about that possibility during the interview and they said it was HIGHLY unlikely, they had only done it once, but apparently I have impressed them, because they are trying to work it out (no guarantees yet).

Also, I’m still excited about this coming Tuesday. That is when I finally get to see what my house looks like after they have gotten it all cleaned up. I get to do another walk through, make sure everything is okay, and then sign my lease. I hope it is at the very least satisfactory, if not spectacular. There wasn’t a lot to work with, but as long as all the doors have knobs and there isn’t six feet of water in the cellar (there was last time I visited) then I will be pretty happy, I think. See, I didn’t have a problem making a decision about the house, so why are other life decisions so difficult? I think it’s because I over think them. Sometimes, thinking is a bad thing. I should just throw myself into things more often with my first instinct and see how they go. If I had done that I think I would be much happier with my situation right now and not feeling so trapped by everything. I’m not in a good place.

I’m keeping my spirits up though. I’m going home to see my family for the weekend. My mom just got two new baby kittens, they are long haired and snow white. I have a real soft spot for kittens (I am very much considering getting two for my house. They need a buddy, so two is the only option). Usually, I’m not much of an animal lover, but I can make an exception if they are cute and promise to be cuddly… and for God’s sake, use the litter box.

I guess I have moved along in some of the decisions now. I think I know what I want to do in the majority of the situations. The most important thing is I would like to just drop out of school, quit work, and just vanish for a while. Hop the next train I see and go where it takes me, bringing only my laptop. E-mail will be my only form of communication, can’t escape with a cell phone. Man, do I hate cell phones. However, since all the gloriouness is not going to work out, I will resort to the other changes. I am still reading that “The Case for Faith” book by Lee Strobel, and it is really having an impact. It counters a lot of the concerns I had about religion. I really think that by the finish I could be seeing things differently. I’m only about halfway through now. I will now thank an individual by name (probably the first time ever on my site, I don’t like to mention people’s names, too personal and it’s not your business), thank you, Hannah, this has been very helpful and I’m not even done yet. Good call, I appreciate it.

Isn’t it horrible when you are in the mood to write, but nothing will come out? That is the state I have been in for three days, notice this post was just me rambling. I don’t have anything interesting to say, nor have I really had an original thought in days. My life is becoming too boring and tedious, and just depressing in general. Something big will change soon though, so watch out for it. I hate redundancy.

     My post yesterday tells of how I am constantly confused and can not ever make up my mind in almost any aspect of my life. I am going to further validate that fact by writing, now, about my religion. Let’s start at the beginning, for a very long time, I was a Christian. Of course, as an unquestioning child, it is easier enough to be whatever you are asked to be. My grandparents were Christian and took me to church on the occasional Sunday, therefore I was Christian. But, as I got older I began to go to church less and less. Then, one day, I just stopped all together, but I still believed.

When my dad died (I was 12), I began to go to church every week again. I rode my bike to the church down the street, I went to youth group, I even was a greeter for a while. Granted, this was in Florida, so there were not a lot of people my age around (the average was 60), but I still enjoyed myself. They were nice people and I liked helping out at the church when I was needed. I did this for a while and even got baptized there when I was 14. Now, I’m really not sure what happened. There is no real explanation for it, except that I would question the existence and possibility of the computer sitting right in front of me, but somewhere along the lines, I stopped believing. Maybe it was the fact that there is an infinite amount of space in the Universe and the odds of us being important, nay, let’s go with the slightest bit significant, to whatever higher power may, or may not, be out there was astronomical. I put the same argument to those beliefs as I do to whether or not aliens exist… Of course aliens exist, how could they not. The odds of no other life ever coming into existence in all of the limitless solar systems out there, in the probably limitless number of undiscovered Universes in the multiverse, is ludicrous. So, why would a higher power care for us at all. Do we care for ants? False, bad example… Do we care for the individual cells that exist in everything that exists? No, we do not. We don’t have feelings for each individual living cell in each and every living thing, So, why would a god possibly care for us?

On some days that is my story, and I would argue it, but only on those days. On other days, I see other stories. I woke up this morning an agnostic, meaning, to me, there could be something out there, but if there is I don’t know if they have any relevance to us. A couple of days ago, I would have claimed atheism, how could there be anything higher than us? And finally, more often than not, I claim Christianity… in a way. On those days I see our God, I talk to him, and, here’s the punch line you were waiting for, I think he’s a total douche bag. HA! These are the few religions I jump back and forth from. Confusing? Agreed. I can’t keep track of what I believe in any better than I can keep track of what I want in my relationship,  or what Operating System I want to use, or what I want to eat. If I could pick one thing, know I want it, know I will always want it, and stick with it, I would be infinitely happier.

What is the point of all this? I want something to believe in. I like the Christian faith, it makes more sense than anything else, again, I don’t much care for religious people, I feel they are very annoying, but still, the faith itself as fine. I think they consciously choose to act like nut cases. I talked to a very good friend of mine, who happens to be the daughter of a preacher I believe. I think what I actually said was something along the lines of I don’t have a set belief, but I’m open to hearing ideas. She had an instant suggestion, she said she had just the book for me. (FYI, it was “The Case for Faith” by Lee Strobel) After I couple of weeks, which I thought she was using to get home and borrow the book, she brought me a copy and told me to keep it. (p.s. Not going to happen, I will get it back to her somehow, or pay her for it. I was mislead by the illusion that I was borrowing it, I feel bad taking things from people.) This was yesterday.

I have since, meaning this morning, already read 50 pages of the book, and I love it. I’m not too far into it, obviously, and I’m not going to say it’s going to answer every question I’ve ever had (actually I’ve already written on down and stuffed it inbetween the pages), but it is bringing up a lot of the points that I have a problem with in the religion. I won’t go into boring detail, but my point is I’m thinking differently already. Why is this relevant? Well, I’ve decided that I am easily persuaded into different ways of thinking. If I go home and talk to my family (all of them agnostics) I start to feel one way, but I can read something like this and talk to her and feel a completely different way about the existence of everything. It disturbs me a little bit, that my belief system is so weak that I can, with only a couple of words, be persuaded into believing something completely new. I don’t like it.

I want to change that, I still want to know what I want out of life, but I think the first step is knowing what I believe, and then sticking with it. That sounds like a good way to live to me. Now, if I have doubts I can’t do it, so any questions I have I want to get answered, but I really want a set belief system. You can probably tell from my writings that from day to day I believe different things and think completely different. I will go as far as to say In a couple of days, I can manage to change everything about myself without even trying. Example? Back at the end of January I was into freedom of software and developers, I was going to open source all of my applications and reveal everything I know and actually try and get involved in the community. I changed my mind on that one real quickly. By later that week, after writing the randomness that corresponds to that thought process, I decided not to GPL all of my code and to keep all of my stuff mine. At the moment I don’t want others taking my ideas, modifying them, selling them, and making money off my creativity. That just doesn’t seem right, but do you see how much my opinion changed in no time, and computers are my life. If I can changed everything I believe about them and their theory in a day, why can’t I change absolutely everything? I can, and it sickens me.

I guess what I am really trying to say is, after 19 years, I want to know who I am and I would like it to be semi-consistent from day to day. I want to be able to tell someone what I believe, and then still believe it two weeks down the road. I understand that after years I am going to change, but I don’t want it to flip around from one day to another. I want consistency in my brain. Anyone found that Reality Controller yet?

     The device in my head that I have chosen to call my “Reality Controller” is on the fritz. Meaning my reality shifts from one thing to another frequently causing excessive lapses in judgment and a lot of confusion. What am I talking about? I can’t make decisions. I don’t know what I want out of life. One minute I’m sure that I want one thing, then the next minute I’m completely sure that I want something entirely different. It doesn’t make a lot of sense at all. Me and my girlfriend (of only about 6 weeks) have been having a lot of problems. I know, it is way too early in that relationship to be doing that, but none the less, we are. We almost broke up over the weekend, a couple of times actually. However, all of a sudden Sunday, after spending a day talking about what we needed to do, we had one of our best days ever. Which confuses me even more. Now, when I was so sure that we were finished, I kinda want to keep her. It’s a messy situation. It doesn’t stop there though, that’s just my relationship story.

It is appearing in other aspects of my life as well. I find myself unable to make any real life altering decisions. I never know what I really want. I can’t even decide my to use as my primary operating system. I’m currently using Fedora, which is working well, but there are some kinks. I kind of want to switch back to Windows, but only when Fedora does something that pisses me off. Im checking out Ubuntu right now, and I also installed ReactOS (just to see how it was progressing really, don’t intend to use it any time soon). I can’t decide which is for me. It’s still the server I’m messing with, so I really want to go with a Linux kernel, Fedora is my long time favorite, but Ubuntu looks so appealing. And I’m still considering going the Arch route and just setting everything up myself. Ugh, I’ll get there eventually.

All of these decisions, from small to big, effect my life and I can’t decide what I want. Is it normal to not know what you want? I mean, shouldn’t I know what is best, and what I want to do for the rest of my life, and where I want to be? See… my reality controller is definitely busted. So, if you find a replacement lying around. Let me know please. In the mean time, I’m playing with Qemu trying to get some virtual machines up so I can just play with whatever distributions I want. Should be nice. (Also, jumping off the balcony seems good )