Tuesday, September 19, 2006 

Failure

First off, I would like to apologize for not writing for so long nor commenting in anyone's blog; I simply have been very busy and have not had much time!

That said, I am going to write about the topic of failure.

Why?

'Cause I am a failure.


:P


Well, I'm not saying that I'm a failure, but I did experience a minor failure today. I failed a paper.

I am definitely not pleased about this, and I am definitely not used to failing. I graduated Summa Cum Laude, after all.

The news of my failure did feel somewhat strange, but in all honesty, it was not altogether unexpected. The professor's assignment was vague, and I was a bit confused on how to tackle it. But despite the vagueness of the assignment, she had very specific criteria to grade by. My failure is not due to a lack of effort -- I worked hard on the paper -- but rather my ignorance of the criteria. But now that I have a better idea of what the professor wants (or do I?), I should do better the next time.

Failure can be a wonderful thing. I often tell my saxophone students to not be afraid of making mistakes because mistakes can be great learning experiences. My failure was just that -- a mistake. I will learn from it.

I think that there are two possible reactions to failure. When confronted with failure, one may simply give up and begin to think that he or she does not possess the skill to succeed. Perhaps someone who gives up has often experienced failure and has gotten used to it. Such a person might begin to think that because he failed that he is a failure, and no matter how hard he tries to change it, it cannot be changed. Thus this person might begin to accept failure because failure has become part of his own self-image. It's hard not to fail if one thinks that he or she can't succeed!

The other reaction --the reaction that I am aiming for -- is to learn from the experience and quickly brush it off. Brooding on failure accomplishes nothing; the failure is in the past and there is nothing one can do to change it. Instead, perhaps it is best to learn from our mistakes and concentrate on making better efforts in the future. All we have is the future -- the past and present don't exist! (Whoa...think about that for just a moment.....)

I failed the paper, but I am not a failure. The failure of one paper does not in any way mean that I am a poor writer; it simply means that I did not meet the criteria of that one particular assignment. The professor is going to meet with me on Thursday to discuss the paper, and I intend to learn what I could do to improve it so I can really do a good job the next time around. She told me that I write well and that I'm very literate, so it seems that the reason I failed was due to poor organization. Again, I WAS confused about the assignment, and that obviously led to my poor organization of the paper. The only things I can do in the future are to make sure that I have no confusion over future assignments and to learn from my mistakes.

In a way, I am actually pleased that I failed. If nothing else, it provides me with a challenge to overcome! Yay!


Failure? HA! I spit in your face.

You don't faze me, Failure!

Bring it.

11:05 AM | |

Monday, September 04, 2006 

I should talk to this girl in my class...

Yo. It has been well established that despite my age, I am very inexperienced with girls. The reasons for that are long and many, the most notable of which is that I have suffered from poor self-esteem and extremely low confidence for the majority of my life. Maybe I'll write about my history with poor self-esteem later, but thankfully I do not feel like such a worthless swine anymore. I believe that I have conquered most of my insecurities. But despite that, I suppose that I still retain a degree of shyness. I need to get over it.

There's this girl in one of my classes that sits right next to me to my left. She is extremely pretty and seems quite intelligent. However, I haven't talked to her yet. I want to, but I haven't been sure what to say to her and how to introduce myself. Perhaps a simple "hi" would work best?

She intrigues me on a purely visual basis; I don't know anything about her other than she is pretty, has dark, long hair, and is very articulate and an eloquent speaker. She seems to know a lot about poetry. That intrigues me because I don't know nearly enough about poetry, but I would like to learn.

I do not like her; i.e., I have no crush on her. I have learned through experience that I shouldn't let myself develop crushes on people that I know nothing about. That said, she is intriguing to me because I wish to know more about her. And in order to do that, I must talk to her. I will be in this class for about 3 months, and if I don't talk to someone who sits right next to me, that would be really pathetic. ^^

How about I talk to her tomorrow? Why shouldn't I? What do I have to lose? Nothing.


One of the things that I have also learned this year is to NOT place women on pedestals. No matter how great a lady may seem at first, it's entirely possible and even probable that one will find out something that is a great turn off. I have also learned not to jump the gun on trying to get into relationships with girls; it's simply best to know them as friends first. Do not expect anything out of anybody. Love is not forced; it simply happens. Therefore, I will never force anything again -- no more awkward moments of me telling some girl that I barely know that I like her! In the future, the lucky lady that will land me will get no such help -- she'll have to unravel the Mystery that is me for herself!

I need to talk to this girl in my class, but not to scope out as a girl that I'd possibly "date." I only want to talk to her for the experience of overcoming my fear of talking to girls and to see if she is as interesting to talk to as my intuition tells me she might be.

Updates later!

9:20 PM | |

Saturday, September 02, 2006 

Sober Intoxication and Mr. Huggy

I need to get one thing out in the open here:



I don't drink. At all.


(Well, I do drink water...but you know what I mean. :P )


Despite the fact that I am over 21 and have been in college for a number of years, I have not taken to alcohol. I've tried it on occasion, but never in enough doses to actually get drunk. The closest to inebriation that I have ever been was several years ago when my uncle pretty much forced me to play a drinking game with him. I had two beers, and I felt a little tipsy. But other than that and a handful of other times being *slightly* tipsy, I have been sober all of my life. I do not know what it feels like to go all the way and get drunk.

Why don't I drink? I simply have a great fear of handing over any conscious control of my mind and actions over to the influence of a foreign agent. For example, I do not want to go to a college party, get wasted, and find out the next morning that I had unprotected sex with a stranger and am now faced with herpes. I'm also NOT a fan of feeling sick, so another reason that I don't drink is because I do not want to have the pleasure of dealing with a bad hangover. There's a lot of discussion of drinking in "moderation," and that might be fine for a lot of folks, but I think that it's best for me if I just don't get started in this stuff at all. In my experience, a lot of drinking is done for purely social reasons, but I figure that anybody who wants me to drink to "fit in" is not really my friend at all.

But despite all of this, I am a great fan of intoxication. I believe that this state can be reached without the use of drugs. And I have been naturally intoxicated many times.

Here is an example of my natural intoxication:

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting


Yes, that is me. And yes, that is a diaper. This picture was taken on my last birthday, and I thought that it would be a great, fun stunt to dress up in a diaper and a cape and go out in public. For this stunt, I created the character of "Mr. Huggy." The role of Mr. Huggy is to, of course, hug random women. I was feeling very lonely at the time, and I felt like I could use some good hugs with strangers to cheer me up. Thus I created the character to give women a good excuse to have a good laugh and hug the freak. The depends diaper, besides looking weird, is meant to establish the mental connection between the act of hugging and the established brand name of Huggies diapers. Diapers and hugging go hand in hand, I think.

The other function of Mr. Huggy is intoxication. It is not every day that I wear a diaper and a cape in public, so in doing this, I was celebrating The Out of the Ordinary. Mr. Huggy was an impromptu manifestation of the Joyous Human Spirit in me, and by donning this persona, I brought smiles and laughter to those who least expected it. That, for me, is what this Drama that is Life is all about. Intoxication is a celebration of life, and one does not need drugs to reach that state. I am high on life all of the time. So the next time that someone sees me in a diaper and asks me where I found the good weed, I will have to tell him or her that, "There is no weed. There is only me."

I am feeling the need for another public stunt, and, of course, it has to be larger in scale than Mr. Huggy. I am in the planning stages! I will divulge more later!.

8:43 PM | |

 

I'm going to reconcile with Carolina.

ight. I'm going to reconcile with Carolina, for my part. This may be a dumb move, but I believe that it's the proper move, and I'll explain why.

I am attending college again, and even though my school is very large (~35,000 students), one tends to run into people that he or she knows on occasion. Therefore, it should not be shocking that I ran into Carolina (though it certainly shocked her!)

I have not seen her in just about a year (since last September). After I graduated (the first time), I did not get to see her nearly as often as when I was in school, but we continued to talk on AIM a lot. This past January we had a big argument (that I have written about before), and we have not talked since then. She hurt me very badly, and I felt that it was in my best interest to cut her off completely. I hated her then. I am not bandying the word "hate" in jest; I truly hated her in the vilest sense of the word. I have not spoken with her since January, and I offered no explanation. I simply just quit talking to her.

Last year, she and I were working on writing a story together, and we created a Livejournal just for this story so we could discuss it with ease online. We had a lot of fun working on it (I truly hope that I can meet another woman that I can be creative with), but naturally, it was never finished. Indeed, we never even left the planning stages (the story was to be a novel)! When I looked at this journal three or four months after our January Spat, I noticed that she had removed her screenname from it. I suppose that she was sending a message that "I am no longer of any importance to her and that I have no place in her life any longer," and naturally, I was a little upset by this, so in retaliation I removed her name from my then regular Livejournal's friendslist. The very next day I noticed that she had removed my name from her friendslist too (and she had a huge friendslist of over 100 people...she's a livejournal junkie...so she must have been looking hardly in order to spot my missing name on her friendslist....)

Thus, it seemed, our Silent War was commencing. Both of us were trying to show the other through silence and deletion that we had no place in each other's life any longer. Through this process of deletion, we were effectively erasing our past. It was rather childish on both of our parts.

I have long since forgiven Carolina. Our fight was a long time ago (eight months), and really, it was rather silly to begin with. Sure, she had been changing from the girl that I fell for into something that I didn't respect nearly as much, but the truth is that I was a very insecure person back then (having grown up with a lifetime of self-esteem problems), and my insecurity with her caused me to be rather overbearing and demanding of her. So she said that she didn't *need* my friendship -- but the reason she probably said that was because my insecurities likely "drove her up the wall" and caused her to lose a bit of respect that she might have otherwise had for me. I'm not excusing what she said - it hurt very badly regardless, but I now see how my insecurities caused her to want to keep her distance from me at times.

The weird thing is that even though I have forgiven her, I have not yet told her! And just because I've forgiven her doesn't mean that I felt like talking to her; it only means that what has been done is in the past and I am over it. I'm not perfect, and I'm sure to make grievous errors from time to time (as I have done in the case with her), and there will be situations in life when I will hurt someone and that person will need to forgive me. Why shouldn't I forgive her then? Hate, I experienced, only corrodes one's soul. I was overly bitter when I hated her; bitter about everything, and I felt so alone and depressed. Hate only has the power to destroy, and fortunately for me, I was able to recognize this. I realized that I had to forgive her in order to move on and grow from this; holding on to these bitter feelings truly serves no purpose.



As I stated above, I ran into Carolina a few days ago. Her reaction was very perplexing to me, but I am not too surprised, given our History. After I write down what her reaction was, I am pretty sure that I am going to be told that reconciliation is futile. Maybe it is.

I saw her first; it was pure coincidence that we were near. I was walking aimlessly around the big university fountain in order to stretch my legs between classes. During the circling of the fountain, I just happened to see her approaching from the direction of the library. When I saw her, we were only about 15 feet apart from each other. I was actually glad to see her, and I approached her because I wanted to say "hi" and that I have no hard feelings towards her anymore.

She was shocked to see me. Because I have not talked to her since January, she had no idea that I came back to school, so it really must have been rather shocking for her to look up and see me, the one that she shared many good and bad memories with, standing right in front of her. I was still feeling a bit dazed at finally seeing her again after so much time; so much so that I forgot to smile and wave at her immediately after she saw me. I just kind of stood there in front of her. When she saw me, her eyes went wide and wild in that deer-in-the-headlights kind of way. Her mouth dropped open, and I heard an audible gasp. After a second or two, she regained her composure. What did she do next?

SHE WALKED RIGHT ON PAST ME WITHOUT SAYING "HI" TO ME OR EVEN OTHERWISE ACKNOWLEDGING MY PRESENSE!!!!! I knew things had gone badly between us, but I really didn't know that they were so bad to where she didn't even want to say hi to me. Stunned, I stood there in amazed stillness and watched her walk away. A few seconds later, I started to follow her, and when I got closer, I shouted her name. "C-a-r-o-l-i-n-a!" She momentarily half-tilted her head in my direction upon hearing me call her name, but she then focused in front of her and walked even quicker away from me. I resigned myself to the fact that she was not going to talk to me at all, and I just watched her walk completely out of my life forever.


Perhaps I should have told her months ago that I forgave her, hahahaha!


Strangely, I was not very upset when she ignored me. Perhaps it is because I am over the bitterness of the past. I'm largely indifferent to what she thinks about me now. But still, it was a big "what the fuck" moment! I found it hard to concentrate in my next class because the incident had left me so confused.


I know what Carolina's Silent Message to me was in ignoring me that day. She is obviously still playing the Silent Game (how ironic that it was actually I who started it), and her refusal to talk to me was supposed to show me how Utterly Over Me she is and that I No Longer Have Any Place in Her Life, and that She Doesn't Care. On the surface, her show of apathy towards me might be convincing of that.

Except for one thing.

It is not convincing to me at all.


I shall postulate that it is through her actions of Inaction, her blatant show of ignoring me, that proves to me that She is Soooooo Not Over This. Instead of giving me the impression that she is indifferent to me, she gave me the impression that she still hates my guts; wouldn't someone who was truly over something and now indifferent to it (and me) at least say "hi" in a civilized manner? Her response (or lack of it) is blatant evidence to me that not only is she not over what happened, she cares a great deal about it even still - a full eight months after it happened!


That she would still hold such a grudge against me is rather dumbfounding to me; after all, she was the one who said, "Of course I don't need your friendship!" all those months ago. If I was so expendable to her then, then why should she care so much about it now? I thought that she was practically telling me to "go away" last January. But if she's the one who effectively told me that, then what exactly is she so angry about now? The only thing that I can think of is the little matter of me abandoning her and not offering an explanation for it (LOL! I say that like it's such a little offense, but I know that it was actually rather drastic, and it is definitely nothing that I should be proud of). I cut her off in order to protect myself from getting hurt even more; she truly seemed so uncaring then, and I would have never imagined that she would even care enough to be sad or angry about my abandonment of her.


WOMEN ARE SOME DAMNED CONFUSING CREATURES! I HOPE THAT ALL OF YOU WOMEN OUT THERE UNDERSTAND THAT!




The only rational conclusion that I can come up with is that I meant a lot more to her than she let on, and a lot of her boasting that "she doesn't care" was actually a mental defense mechanism to prevent her from getting too close to someone, me in this case, and getting potentially hurt. Or it may be that she didn't realize that I meant a lot to her at the time that she said those mean things, and it is possible that she realized what I meant to her only after I left her life. Yes, Carolina has exhibited extremely shallow behavior, and that's why I quit the friendship, but one must keep in mind that she and I once greatly enjoyed each other's company and shared many wonderful conversations. I have always felt that even though I will eventually meet other women and possibly enter into relationships with them, I will never have another friendship that is exactly like Carolina's. It was nothing else if not unique. Perhaps she realized the uniqueness of our past friendship and how she will never have another exactly like it. It is likely after this realization that the fact that I left her hit her hard and hurt her.


It seems as though I hurt her too. That is the only rational explanation to account for her obvious antagonism against me.



Now I know that this friendship is lost, and I am not attempting to patch it up again. However, I mentioned at the beginning of this Damned Long Post (as always, it seems) that I wish to reconcile my part in all of this with her. I no longer wish to play the Silent Game. She obviously "showed me up" in a way that can only deem her the Victor of it. This Silent Feud of ours is, like all conflict, ultimately futile. It is childish; we have both acted extremely immaturely, and I now feel as though we need to grow out of this state. We are both adults, and we should therefore handle things with fairness and responsibility; not childish mind-games! Therefore I am going to write her a handwritten letter in order to show her my thoughts about all of this. I will give her an explanation of why I abandoned her. I will explain how I felt hurt by what she said. But my main purpose is to tell her that I forgive her, and I will describe the adverse and sickening aspects of hate and why one needs to forgive in order to heal his or her wounds. Ultimately, I will suggest to her, she should think about forgiving me for all that I have done wrong if she wants to move on completely.

Nay, our friendship likely will not be patched, but I don't want us to die each other's mortal enemies. Ultimately, we had a stupid and silly quarrel in the Grand Scheme of Things; many people have endured far worse pain and still found it possible to forgive those who hurt them.

I don't know if I will tell her this, but I still love her, to a degree. I am not talking about romantic love - heavens no, not anymore! But she is really the first girl that I fell in love with, and even if she didn't reciprocate it, that doesn't change that I once loved her. She is the one ultimately responsible for instilling passion within me, and going through this ordeal with her is something that has resulted in me becoming much more confident and mature! Why shouldn't I have some love for someone who, at the end of the day, has had mostly positive impacts on my life?

It is because of her that I realized that I love the Pursuit of Knowledge for Its Own Sake. It is because of her that my creative side has been unleashed. Without knowing her, who knows, I might not have had the courage to follow my dreams. I might have settled.

For these reasons, I am going to reconcile my part in all of this, foolish though I am.

12:00 AM | |

<body>