Whew... been a while since i have posted.

I am going to be moving into a friend's (Ben) place while he is in Kuwait; he has asked me if i would take care of his cat and his vehicles for the 6 months that he is over seas. It is near the Fairfield Commons which is a very nice location and a nice price as he will be covering rent and i will just pay for utilities and internet (and if i want cable). He is leaving in roughly a month.

Living at home is starting to drive me mad. I try to stay out for as long as possible, in hopes to avoid the 'rents. Not that i dont care for my parents it is just everytime i am around them they just complain about this or that. I try to give them some one-on-one time with me at least once a week, but it can be hard to schedule.

See you at the aftermath, peace.

I was told I needed to separate my thoughts… yeah… I can barely get my thoughts to slow down long enough to get them typed or on paper, let alone organize them. So, for you my critic, I will attempt to write in decent form and with some type of hierarchy and organization my thoughts and feelings towards today’s Eastern Religions Class. (AND.. I guess I can tab in my paragraphs… but don’t expect too much out of me all at once)

I felt like a little girl in class today. Honestly. I almost walked up to the front of the class, pulled out my green carpet square and sat intently staring up at my professor. I was in tune and just soaking in each word she spoke and hung on them as if they were a treat from the gods themselves. She brought roughly 10 little figurines of porcelain to help narrate and depict the stories of the gods that she would deliciously paint before my eyes. As she delineated each story they seemed to weave in and out of each other almost lulling me to sleep countless times. I was in such euphoria.

Why did the stories in Sunday School never invite me so? I have heard probably thousands of times of how Jonah was swallowed by a whale and lived to tell about it. Shouldn’t that have made me eager to read more… I should have at least wiggled in my seat with some sort of excitement. Well I am sure I did but the thoughts running through my head were probably not of Jonah, but of ‘o, I wonder what snack we will have today.’ ‘Is the big hand supposed to be on the 6 when snack comes or the little hand.’ Or ‘O… for Gump sake, clock would you tick faster.’ Regardless how intriguing the stories were intended to be, they just don’t not seem to scale even close to the excitement brought on by the stories of the Hindu gods. Though, how can one God compete with 330 million Hindu gods and goddess’? Rapture!

Kali. WOAH!!! (blank stare) What a beast! Kali –or- ‘the Dark One’ licked up the blood of all the demons she would slay; for she knew that if the blood touched the ground another demon would manifest itself on the spot. To save the towns folk she slaughtered all of the demons plaguing them and licked up all of their blood before it had a chance to barely breathe oxygen let alone touch the dust of the Earth. But she then got drunk off of the blood that she then went on a killing spree of even the people and wore their skulls as a necklace and their leg and arm bones as a skirt. She did not stop until she was touched by Shiva, her husband. Once her true love touched her she immediately turned back into Parvati.

Kali is a goddess who gets shit done. She will stop at nothing to get things in order and if a few civilians get slaughtered in the way, not a problem. I respect her. I fear her. Who am I kidding, I idolize her.

Destruction in the Hindu faith isn’t always considered negative. It is just part of an ongoing process. Part of Samsara, the cycle of suffering… Of Birth, Death, and Rebirth. Bhag. Gita said, “Just as a person discards old clothes and puts on new ones, once the body is destroyed, the soul simply puts on a new body.” Destruction is not only present it is a necessity. It is life.

Personally, I struggle with this concept. While I understand/comprehend/can write about it, I don’t fully grasp it. Sitting here Agnostic, neither seeking nor being stagnant, I would like to believe we could potentially be reincarnated to be given another chance at Liberation, or Moksha… but I just can’t bring myself to believe it. So.. here is my catch fall… Say I find Moksha. I am Liberated. What happens? I dissolve into nothingness and everything at the same time. I become one with the Force? Is this the concept? I just cannot wrap my mind around what happens next. This is where my understanding ends.

May The Force Be With You

I will be using this image to differentiate my 'The Awakening Project,' my Eastern Religions class journal project, from the other random posts I will add.

Enjoy!

Eastern Religions Journal Project

So for the next 10-15 posts or so I will be turning my blog into a sort of journal-ish reflective tool for my Eastern Religions class. This may be painful to read and probably even more painful for me to write. I know nothing about Eastern Religions; I am ashamed to say I only know about Christianity and probably barely anything there as well. It seems the more you learn the more you realize what you do not know. Therefore the more knowledgeable you are, the dumber you become. So at some point I may have believed I was at least knowledgeable in Christianity or in the Bible but now I just feel as if there are so many things to unravel.

Honestly, I find this Religion class to be a breath of fresh air when lately I have been smuggled out by Christianity and mainly Baptists. I stopped attending church about 6 to 7 months ago, woah I can’t believe it has already been that long, to escape from the bigotry and overall lack of self-knowledge. One of my serious problems of the Christian church is their complete lack of understanding of other cultures and religions; I too was victim to this accusation. Very few people of the congregation would even look beyond their noses to past the bible to the outside world. I have taken this summer to attempt to thoroughly reflect on my life and my aspirations as an individual. I thought a lot of ‘The Awakening’ a novel written by Kate Chopin in the late 1800s and published in the early 1900s, it is a story of a confused woman who seeks to find herself: physically, mentally, sexually, and spiritually. I started to just flip through my copy of the book that I read and completely marked up in my AP English class. I came across a purple highlighted quote, I tried to do some sort of color organization, that spoke to me about how I felt every time I would step foot into the church building itself or even the sanctuary; “An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her with a vague anguish...like a shadow... a mist passing across her soul's summer day.” (chopin) I did feel trapped. Motionless. I felt like a little marionette moved to do what was expected of me, what people wanted from me. I only started to see myself as a ‘real girl’ when I realized I didn’t just believe what was said behind that clear pulpit. Many times I would break my trained zombie-gaze from the pastor to the rest of congregation and I could faintly make out their marionette strings nod their heads in agreement to statements I knew for a fact they couldn’t possibly have formed their own opinions on the matter. So eventually I cut my stings and my goal for the course of this class is to go through a sort of metamorphosis… a change of heart and hopefully soon I can look through a new set of eyes at the once beautiful world I used to wake up to that is now bleak and cloudy.

“She could only realize that she herself — her present self — was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes.” –Chopin in ‘The Awakening’

"I am not an angry girl
but it seems like I've got everyone fooled
every time i say something they find hard to hear
they chalk it up to my anger
and never to their own fear
and imagine you're a girl
just trying to finally come clean
knowing full well they'd prefer you
were dirty and smiling

and I am sorry
I am not a maiden fair
and I am not a kitten stuck up a tree somewhere"

-"not a pretty girl" Ani DiFranco

Aww, no face

Defining Myself

This Chapter in my life seems much blurrier and more complex than i imagined. Defining who i am and who i will represent myself to be seems to be the main topic at hand when i lay my head on my pillow at night. While i have never had a problem knowing who i was.. defining it and fine tuning that is exposing itself to be troublesome.

Ya. I feel just like this.

I am ready to move back home, save the mulah for a bit. Then possibly moving back out, alone.

Mom is always telling me, ya you really should just live alone because it seems you cannot live with other people. Which is proving to be true.

Roughly a month and half left. Maybe instead of moving back out i can be saving up to go to Europe for a month, and just backpack. That is something i have always wanted to do, and I guess now is the time to do it.

Meh, the whole mess has got me frustrated enough that i am losing concentration, i forget what i am doing at times. Honestly sometimes i am just flabbergasted by other people, what they are capable of doing, what they say during it, and their response to your sanity.

One more way to prove I am not good with people. Unfortunately i feel i can read people well enough, just interacting with these other HUMANS just grows on you from day to day.

geesh.

Mom got a moziac piece into this art show at the DAI for students and teachers. The reception is today. Mom is pretty stoked about it and has my whole day planned out.
I am proud of her, she doesnt realize how big of an honor it really was to get her piece into the show, she is just assuming that they took everyones, bah.
She did a great job, and they recognized that
Now i just need to get a piece in, i didnt qualify cause I have not taken a class there this past year.

Nrrrd Grrrl

yep. It is official.

Yes i probably ended a wonderful relationship with the one guy who understood me. Yes i regret it. Yes i thought about it. Yes i cried. I am crying.

Why did this feel so right but now feel so wrong.

I was prepared to spend the rest of my life with him. I just felt... felt I deserved someone who would tell me he didn't deserve me and someone to constantly remind me of his love. Not with words. With actions. With gifts. Hell even with song.

I feel like i am going to vomit i am so scared and upset.

Luckily Jen will be having me over for dinner tonight, in Columbus. She is making me cobbler and I dont know what else.

/sigh /cry

-torii

I am going to learn how to play Warhammer. Wish me luck, i hope this isnt another poor choice on my part. ya'know? heh

Got Beef?

FACT: I walked out of gaming tonight

Jason pissed me off. He accused me of being self-centered as he was demanding something from me. I am tired of his lazy-ness and lack of gratitude for anything I, or any one else, do for him. So i was like here is your book, and walked out.
I didn't know where to go.
So i went to the burger wagon, it was closed. Sunday.
Then I drove to the bank, got out some mulah from the ATM and then sat in the parking lot at Eric's apartment.
This morning was awful, i got like three hours of sleep because of the AMAZING Batman movie (and hulk and like 15 min worth of Ironman) and then waking up early to go to work. I felt like such a zombie this morning.
Tomorrow morning i take josh to work, again. STUPID car! i am so annoyed with the piece of crap.

/sigh

FACT: I will never consciously take another summer class in my life

...

I am stressing myself over dumb projects and pointless quizzes and exams that i am not having time to enjoy myself or even go somewhere.

At the beginning of the Summer i decreed that i would travel somewhere be it Indianapolis for Gen Con. Somewhere.

To alleviate some of my misfortune i am going to drop my next sections for the summer and just pick them up in the fall. I want to live not live by someone else's standards of when i should graduate and with what degree.

I get so annoyed with my boring life that i have been sending Josh home lately. He will just come over and play Pokemon on my couch while i am doing homework or reading and it kinda irks me so i just, kindly, ask him to leave. I mean playing pokemon while i am playing on the playstation is one thing, but i hate it when i am like ‘omg, someone lvled up’ or ‘haha your dead’ or whatever cause i too have relentlessly played Pokemon and the sounds are forever engraved in my brain. Therefore it is distracting when i can hear him dying or battling it up on my couch and am admiting to myself that ya... you suck you registered for classes. Just get a better job josh and get out of my hair. Is that mean? Probably. But I dont take it back, i mean it. LOL

work

When Sinclair ‘shut down’ for the summer, so did my costume shop job. It was a love-hate relationship anyways. I enjoyed working on all of the hakima pants and kimonos and such for ‘Ama and the White Crane’ but gag me for ‘An Experiment with an Air Pump’ those designs just sucked and all I really got to do was sharpen pencils all day long. The designer of this particular show, Air Pump, was not as skilled, talented, visionary, or creative as my boss and the designer of Ama. Therefore Air Pumps designs consisted of, ‘o we will just rent 95% of the show’ and the rest of it I will basically make and it will be shoddy work where you can see where I sewed and it is lumpy and, wait how did you get through graduate school? Anyways… Air Pump was an amazing play where the director wanted to take it edgy and funky while the designer hired on was hesitant and indecisive.

So I am working for a website now as a moderator. Online babysitting. I make sure the kiddies aren’t having cyber sex, uploading raunchy photos, uploading copyrighted material, claiming they are someone else, posting flame, and the list continues. The site is for kids of the ages 13 to 17. Well anyways it has made me soo perverted. I look for sexuality in everything now. I find it. Myself and the other moderators don’t miss a chance to save all the porn pictures and other nasty images the brats upload to provoke the worst “OMG WTF IS THAT” out of each other. I love it.

One downside is that now when I type in aim or emails or whatnot, I sometimes revert to the kids typing, when I think it is hilarious. Most of the kids on the site seem to have invented their own form of l33t speak if you will, their own dialect.

My Introduction

(my brother and i sitting in his living room)