chipotle | Resurfacing

It's been a while since I've posted in this journal -- almost a month.

I'd like to be able to come up with a good excuse as to why I've been so lax here. Or if not a good excuse, a dramatic excuse. Intense depression and offline time soul-searching. Travelling up and down the coast trying to find myself. Time spend at a hidden Buddhist monastery. Something.

But, there really isn't anything like that.

It's possible that I'm suffering a bit of "public journalling burnout"; I've been doing this reasonably consistently for about four years, it looks like. The first journal entry I made (in my homebrew journal system) was July 6, 2000. I'd actually tried it in 1998 with more of a "columnist" approach -- a thousand words on a given topic -- but after only managing to do a half-dozen of those, I decided journal snippets were an easier target. On the one hand it doesn't feel like it's been all that long; on the other hand, it means I've been doing this longer than a whole lot of folks.

I see looking back that in the first couple of years I was posting two or three entries a month. Here on LiveJournal, I ramped that up; I've never been a daily journalist but, doing a quick calendar scan, I've usually managed 10-15 entries a month.

So what happened in June, 2004? Has my life stopped being interesting enough for me to write about? I had the road trip with my mom a couple weeks ago, which went pretty well, all told; I'm still working on a journal entry about that, but haven't had the motivation to finish it. We've got an artist for Why Coyotes Howl who I'm pretty excited about. I have a couple other projects I'm trying to either kickstart or to move from pipedream to, at the very least, on-paper notes. I've been thinking about a few different "personal essay" topics I want to journal on, most recently the distinction between rural and urban living as seen by people like myself whose life experience is almost entirely comprised of suburbia.

Part of it might be my old bugaboo of time organization coming to bite me again. I'm letting myself spend too much time online roleplaying (and not enough of that on Bandari, where I really should be putting my time if I'm going to be engaging in such a time sink). I'm spending too much time wandering without buckling down and paying attention to important personal projects. This, I can attend to, as long as I force myself to do so. I'm also in a restless and mildly depressed phase, which never helps matters.

And a lot of it is that I've been feeling more political lately. My posting in Barking at the Moon is still relatively light, but it's more active than this journal is.

The truth, of course, is that politics can and do entwine with the personal; keeping politics mostly out of this journal leaves me somewhat muted. And it doesn't keep political controversy out of the picture anyway. I've had my church's fight with a Texas bureaucracy blithely dismissed (with a completely unrelated court ruling dragged into the discussion solely for extra controversy bits). And when I agreed that it was offensive for liberals to cruelly mock conservatives, my assertion that the "cruelly mock" aspect was where the offense lay was met with a impassioned response that carried an uncomfortable undercurrent of you clearly don't understand that Liberals hate America, and cruelly mocking them is just fine. (In fact, it was about the time I got this that I stopped writing in LiveJournal, and I suspect that this isn't coincidental.)

I've been working on ways to conclude this for far too many idle minutes at work between real documents, so I'm just going to say this. I read things I disagree with from friends; there are times where I have to grit my teeth to get past what amounts as pretty vicious attacks on my beliefs. I try not to write things here that will make them grit their teeth, and I try to understand why they believe the way they do. This is a hallmark of basic respect. And respect is the one thing I expect to be reciprocated.

More later -- on other topics. I think part of getting going on this journal is clearing the air a little on this one, though.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I understand totally I think. It’s a tough call for me, as it is on my mind a lot, and really, but, I’m not very good at debating such things. In my recent LJ post, this up, and well, I find that I more often have a sort of biting response to people in my mind, even if they are people whom I respect, and who wrote calm, reasonable posts.

I was just thinking about this before I read this (literally), so, bear with me as I sort of veer off topic. You look at modern society today, and well, it’s really imposable to know any detail of anything but what you personally do as a carrier or hobby unless you are exceptionally bright. This brings up a great problem, how can you possibly keep on track with politics? Who really has time to study and learn every example, every in an out? It makes following, much less debating politics very frustrating. And yet, we can’t just “Leave it to people who know what’s best for you.” That defeats the goal of a democracy.

So what are we left to do? Once upon a time, I think, you could keep up on the issues of government, but is that really possible with the specialization of modern society? And worse, how do you then distill all of that into simply Republican or Democrat? It’s then that it happens, people seem to make that choice, and then defend it tooth and nail. And really, it’s not so hard to blame them for this, as people will use every weakness or failure as an excuse to discount everything else.

Anyway, I at least, am glad to see you post and reply to people when you do, as you tend to say a lot of things that I would like to, much better then I am ever able to.

I've had my church's fight with a Texas bureaucracy blithely dismissed

By the time I saw the post the blithe dismissal had happened and several more comments had been posted and a heated argument began. I, cowardly, didn't step in. And yes, I picked up exactly the same undercurrent, i.e., "cruelly mocking liberals is okay."

Now I'm wishing I had at least posted some sort of supportive comment.

Oh, it wasn't a big deal; I was in some ways just bemused at how the discussion got sidetracked into whether "Catholic Charities" deserved to be recognized by the government as a religious non-profit simply because they had the word "Catholic" in their name, particularly when the person most acidly arguing for that governmental support had a moment earlier been arguing that it's perfectly okay for the government to make an arbitrary distinction between religion and non-religion in the case of the Unitarians. (My response would be that the decision can't be arbitrary in either case, and in the Catholic Charities case, it wasn't. As it turns out, the Texas tax office also agreed when they re-reviewed this and granted the UU church's exception after all.)

The 'cruelly mocking liberals' refers more to an exchange in someone else's journal, when he held up the result of some sort of LJ-ish quiz that terribly mocked people it deemed to be of the neocon ilk and slammed their patriotism and expressed high moral outrage. I asked an admittedly leading question, essentially, "So if you saw the same thing that was viciously attacking the patriotism of liberals chiefly because the cartoonist disagreed with them, that would be just as bad, right?" and was somewhat shocked to get the answer back, point-blank, "Wrong," followed by a diatribe about how liberalism is the source of all evil in today's society and how, if I didn't see that, I should just "go away." It will perhaps not be surprising that it's the journal of the person who started the argument about the church.

At any rate, I can understand a lot of conservative arguments (even when I don't agree with them), but I simply can't understand that mindset.

As is not perhaps wholly unexpected, but sincerely meant anyway, *hug*.

Do you still have my number? Call me sometime?

HUGS

David

Resurfacing

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I'm sorry

Re: I'm sorry

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