Isn't it funny how just when you think things will be different, everything snaps back to being the same. And when you think nothing will ever change and you'll be trapped in the same spot forever, everything changes.

The Thing...

Mostly it's the problem of letting go. I can't let go of you. Already loneliness is setting in. I do feel lonely. Although, that is not because of you necessarily. It is because I am a poor manager of my social life. That is one thing that needs to improve in my life. I feel chronically unloved and it isn't that I don't have friends, it's just that I don't make proper plans with them ahead of time, so I end up feeling rejected when I call them spur-of-the-moment and want to hang out. I think this is the reason why I tend to gravitate toward lonely people, the people who do not relate to others the same way as most people do. I like to be liked and to alleviate someones loneliness helps people like me more.

I do not want to say goodbye to you. You have been a huge part of my life and even though I cannot see myself with you long term, I feel drawn to you. I want to feel you around me, I want your essence to permeate me, I want you. But no, I do not trust you. Without trust, there is a shallow love. I don't want to abide with a shallow love. I imagine my life with you and I do not see happiness.

Yet you're the one that I think of if I watch a romantic comedy. When I think of romance, I think of it in terms of you, in terms of our relationship. You've defined my life, my heart, or at least pieces of it, will always be yours. I will never be whole...

There is a hero inside every single man, father, husband and boy. I don't know why, but it is something all men seem to dream of within themselves.

Go to sleep little leech. You're driving me mad.

Sleeping is something I do all too much. It's a bad sign, but at least I'm wary of bad signs.

I miss him. But more than him, I miss the fun we were having.

But I was missing that for weeks before it ended anyway. I think I've learned some important things about myself. I told myself in the beginning that if it ended, I was having so much fun anyway that it wouldn't matter. I never expected the fun to end so abruptly.

Note to self: life is not fun, and you can never count on the fun to stay.

In other news. I am incredibly lucky to have such great friends. I have good health and a good job and I get to enjoy every sunrise AND sunset and take in the incredible beauty of it all. Life is good, on the whole and I've been too depressed for too long about this sometime loss of love. Romantic love isn't the be-all, end-all of life. I was doing fine before I met him.

my metaphysical malaise

Oh, woe is me that has to keep the night-watch at the blessed IHOP. For hark! Here comes the ghost of Hamlet's father! The other Hamlet! With lots of eggs. Over easy. Not to greasy.

The book told me that there is one great hope that makes life worth it all: the hope that long-lasting inner happiness can be achieved.

I have long since come to the conclusion that long-lasting inner happiness cannot be achieved and that you have to roll with the punches and enjoy the sometime happiness that life does happen to throw at you and grit your teeth through the rest. Grimaces and smiles mostly look the same, after all.
I started to feel really depressed that the Dalai Lama and his psychiatrist friend came to a different conclusion than I had. I started to feel like maybe long-lasting inner happiness was really possible and coming to the wrong conclusion meant that I've been wasting my life. Or maybe it was my conclusion that was right and the Dalai Lama was deluding himself. So I decided that I would ask all my tables what their idea of happiness was. I only had three customers at that point in the night.
The first customer asked me why I was asking. I said, "I'm reading this book called 'The Art of Happiness' by the Dalai Lama and this psychiatrist dude about finding inner happiness and I've come to the conclusion that you should just roll with the punches and enjoy life as you can and grit your teeth through all the rest, but apparently the Dalai Lama and this dude think that a deeper more fulfilling happiness can be reached and I'm not sure what I think about it. What do you think?"
"Sounds like them guys are religious" said the woman. She went on to say, "When you get faith, you can be happy and you can appeal to a higher power and it doesn't matter what happens to you because your strength comes from God."
I asked the woman if she was religious and she said yes. I told her that I was not sure about all of that. She told me that only some people get into heaven and I said I thought that a loving God would be understanding about people like me who question. She said that no, he isn't. There is a window of time to get into heaven, and after a while, the door closes and you can't get in anymore. I thanked the lady for sharing her faith with me as warmly as I could. I told her I appreciated that she was willing to share because so many people are hush-hush about their religious views. I did appreciate it. But I don't agree with her.
The next table that came in was drunk and rowdy. I asked them what they thought happiness was and without missing a beat, the man said "Happiness is now." He smiled and turned to his lady-friend and she said, um, "Happiness is a warm gun!?" and giggled. When she'd finished giggling, she said "Actually, happiness is being sure of yourself." And we talked a bit about what they'd said and I went to my little table and wrote about it in my journal for a minute.

I love this question. I love the people who answer it. I think asking the question brings me happiness.

But I'm still unsure about what I should do about reading this book now. If I disagree with the main premise: happiness, deep, inner, lasting happiness is a reachable goal...should I continue reading it?

The lady with religion was right on a few fronts. Religious people do tend to be happier. But for me, my happiness came from the fact that what I believed in was largely unrealistic. The God I believed in once was not the sort of being that can exist. I don't believe a being can be fully knowing, fully loving, fully engaged in the happenings of people in their daily lives, fully good, and fully understanding and yet remain so aloof and mysterious. I always used to answer the "question of evil" (If God is all knowing and all loving then why does evil exist?) with the answer, "It's just that we don't know the greater good that comes from the evil."
The problem I have with this now is that, why doesn't God make it known to us? Why does he leave us hanging in agony and grief for the evil in the world. I can understand that there must be some loss and some suffering, but if it was at least explained then it would make so much more sense. Instead, in order to preserve my faith, I had to keep slamming my mind shut to the question. The more I slammed my mind shut, the more the questions came, and more slamming and more questions until one day I decided just to ask them. To say the questions out loud...to pray about it. It was then that I experienced the silence of God. Which caused a lot of grief and sadness for me.
Until I just decided that happiness and sadness are passing things, that you enjoy the happiness and grit through the sadness.

The idea that long-lasting deep inner happiness might exist frankly petrifies me. I am a crusty curmudgeon. I can handle the world just so long as I don't try too hard to be happy lest I fail. The dreamer in me is yelling "No no no...chase the rainbows! Play! Be free! Sing your songs!"
And the other Kristens are bludgeoning that obnoxious one with sticks and never let her drive. When she drives things go all to hell.

Maybe I need a little more of that in my life and I should let that Kristen drive more. Maybe crazy ought to happen. Maybe maybe maybe.

I can't get no satisfaction

I started reading a new book, recommended to me by someone close to my heart. The book is, "The Art of Happiness" by Howard C Cutler and the fourteenth Dalai Lama. I skipped the preface and the introduction and dove straight into the first chapter, read it while rolling silverware at IHOP on Sunday morning at 3 am and got into a verbal conversation with the air around me about what happiness is. To sum up, the first few chapters say that happiness is a feeling of contentment with one's life.

And contentment, for me, is something I am largely uncomfortable with.

Which explains why I can be so miserable sometimes. I find the line between contentment and complacency very difficult to draw.

I am uncomfortable with contentment because one of my biggest flaws and one of the biggest flaws of a lot of people...is "resting on our laurels". Now the phrase, "to rest on one's laurels" is from the Roman days when people were awarded laurel wreaths for having achieved some great accomplishment, especially in battle. It has a negative connotation because it implies complacency.

Complacency is one thing that I am not comfortable with at all. Complacency breeds failure, misplaced arrogance and/or the stuck-in-a-ruttedness of someone being overly stuck in their ways.

Where is the line between complacency and contentedness? That is one thing I cannot clearly define without looking into this much further. In one hand, if one labors to make the perfect soup, and at the end of the soup-making process, it is entirely their right to enjoy the soup. It is their right to savor the soup, to be contented that the task to soup making is completed and that they will not starve in the most pleasant of ways as a result of their soup-craftiness. But if the person continues through life not making any more soups because they have experienced soup perfection already that is very bad. And, maybe with most soup-crafters the joys of dreaming of the soup, collecting things for the soup, beginning and finishing the soup process is joy enough to compel them to make future soups, with the Soup of Life...there is much more, too much more at risk.

If you make a soup and you add garlic, there can almost never be too much. Garlic is wonderful. If you are living life and you add love, there ought not be too much either. Love should be like garlic.

But it isn't. You add too much love and people eat that soup and spit it in your face in a violent and boiling rage. They call you innocent and naive. They call you foolish or stupid. They tell you that giving away that much love is wrong because someone will come along and take advantage of you. They tell you that you must limit your garlic or else. They are suspicious of your garlicky soup. They think you are up to something. And your perfect soup is now all over the kitchen floor.

And then you die. The end. No soup for you. Unless...

Unless you are constant soup-crafter. Your excellence is derived from your constant motion.

But then, there is no contentment, or the contentment you experience is an extremely brief cigarette break. The drive to commit the most heinously delicious soup to the mouths of the violent judging masses is ever before you. You are the cook. You never leave the kitchen. There is no rest for you. There are bursts of exhilaration at the end of every achievement, but no long lasting sense of joy or contentment because to stop would be to die, and you don't want to die yet.

Except in that scenario there is a sense of futility because to look at ones entire life as a simple long strung out set of tasks that were either achieved or not achieved doesn't matter at the point of impact...death. It all ends the same. So why not not do anything? Why even make soup? All the soup does is run through the digestive system and become energy for the digesters who also eventually will die. Ah, the delicious futility of it all....

I can't live with it, I can't live without it. Contentment, you know.

And none of this helps me to draw the line between contentment and complacency except to say that contentment leads to complacency. Complacency doesn't exist without some sort of contentment that's run amok.

Today I went for a forty minute bike-ride! It was awesome. I also got hired at a Cafe! I will possibly be going down to part time at IHOP to make way for the new place. I went to K mart and bought myself a bunch of new black shirts for my new job. I start on Monday. I'm stoked.

I am about to do laundry and go for a quick jog, then I work at ten. I also came to the realization that I need more fruits and veggies in my life. If I'm not too exhausted after my shift tomorrow morning I am going to hit up the grocery store.

On the social front, I'm getting together with some Russian peeps and making pizza rolls tomorrow!

I'd say today was a 60% Success on the workout front

a 30% Success on the cleaning front (one load of laundry isn't REALLY cleaning, but it does make the place look a lot better) and a 10% Success on the social front.

Huzzah. Not too terribly successful, but I did land a second job, which makes me very happy.

Purpose

I have decided that this blog is going to be a blog about self discovery now. I know it is for silly crazy rants and that sometimes I will have to let my fingers go still, but I'm in need of finding a new purpose.

I have a few goals this summer. 1) Lose 30 lbs. 2) Become more organized (get in the habit of getting a clean room) and (3) Call friends more, be more social.

Those are my goals. For the summer and now I think part of this blog's new purpose will be to rat on myself if I don't own up to them.

That being said, it is now 3pm and I'm just waking up. Yesterday was a tough day. I had to hurt someone close to my heart. I broke up with him. While I do respect him and care for him deeply, he and I were not communicating, even when we were both in the room together facing each other trying to use our words, it was like we spoke different languages. Our approach to life is so drastically different.

I learned a lot about myself because of this failed love though. I learned that I despise being vulnerable in any capacity, and that feeling vulnerable causes me to obsessively worry about my vulnerability and get into a depressed funk. I learned that the me I envision myself to be and the me I am are not the same person. I learned that most music makes me depressed instead of inspired like it should. I learned the value of taking relationships slow, letting him in inch my inch instead of by storm. I learned that sometimes you have to be the bad guy and it sucks to do the breaking because even though you care a lot about someone, it simply will not work and eventually that will come to the surface, so the choice is either to hurt now or to hurt later, and the longer you wait the more it will hurt.

I am going to use this time to be single and to work on myself. I'm not swearing-off dating, but honestly, I think I have had enough of the dating world for a while. When you are dating, it is often said that you have to take a 'leap of faith' and offer up your heart and it seems clear to me that I for some reason am apparently incapable of doing that. It is the vulnerability problem described above. Either that or my heart-leap legs got chopped off in a tragic relationship-cultivating farming accident when the passion tractor ran me over.