War: Within the Mind

“What do I care for your suffering? Pain, even agony, is no more than information before the senses, data fed to the computer of the mind. The lesson is simple: you have received the information, now act on it. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output.” Chairman Sheng-ji Yang
"Essays on Mind and Matter"
(Fictional from “Alpha Centauri”)

I need to quote things more often.

I also should break this down into two entries but I'm not going to. Two rather large events occurred today and by pure coincidence, they both started at about 5:30 this morning. The first was personal and left me crying outside my dorm for a few moments longer than I should have been. The second occurred to someone else but it had a ricochet effect that hit me two hours later.

Because Facebook has apparently eaten my blog, I'm not going to even use first names in this post. Pardon my pronouns.

I was walking back to my dorm after a party when my slightly psychic iPod drops “Like the Deserts Miss the Rain” by Everything but the Girl. Being the hopeless romantic that I am, my thoughts immediately turned to my boyfriend back in Colorado. I'm heading back to see him in a few weeks but we really don't talk enough and there's been this thing where we both have been lying to the other about how much we miss each other. The idea being that if we don't hurt one another, we'll make the relationship last longer. So we balance stories of good times with reduced descriptions of the sheer amount of time we spend thinking about each other. Of course, when asked directly, I will deny all of this. So, I'm walking along thinking about October 6th when it hits me that he's not the one I'm missing. Yah, I want to see him but he's not the one that I really miss. There's someone else who popped into my head. An old crush from high school who I swore I was over. And I burst into tears right on the steps up to my dorm. Don't really know why I did. Some combination of realizing that I'm never going to get over this guy and he's going to hang like a shadow over my current relationship, which, at the same time, I could never give up if I tried. This annoys and depresses me. I hate my iPod.

Two hours later, after watching the few scenes of the Matrix and laughing mildly at the terrible dubbing over the swear words on the cable broadcast, I got on Facebook to see that a friend of mine had posted a “Note.” Like a Facebook based bloging system, the Notes allow people to spew random crap into cyberspace and get more hits on it than a lot of pop-up adds. I should also mention that my blog now appears in my “Notes” section for no apparent reason. The note in question was a page long diatribe on the individual's hatred of our college and the general emotional constipation of humanity in 2006. Not that I blame him for thinking that. I am certainly just as much a perpetrator of that crime as anyone else as my earlier revelation made very clear to me. He ends the note by mentioning that he is drunk and is going to look at this in the morning and laugh a bit and then hate himself even more. For those of you who have been reading this for a while, you know how I feel about drinking and this only serves to further my annoyance with the “most mild drug.” The whole situation made me wonder what would happen if everyone was forced to be honest about their feeling and weren't forced to rely on artificial stimulants to facilitate human interaction.

The noted Psychologist, Carl Jung claimed that the entire human experience was a movement from collectivity to true individuality and self-understanding through the development of aspects of one's personality and discovering one's true self. I can't help but feel like the process has stalled for our generation. Either because we are living in a wealthy and comfortable culture, or because the very essence of rebellion is quickly absorbed and popularized by advertisers everywhere, we have lost a spark to achieve individuality. We are leaning toward a truly collective society where the boarders between people are virtually nonexistent.

It should be noted, because I am obsessed with Japan, that the Japanese people are going through the reverse of this phenomenon known as Hikikomori. As their culture progressed to a level of total and complete social integration and an ever more complex social network, the backlash movement spurred individuals to break from society. Because there is no rebel population in Japan, those who break free of society are outcasts of a kind and retreat into themselves, becoming Hikikomori, or withdrawn from the world; refusing to even interact with their own families and closest friends.

Where I fall on this wonderful line of social dysfunction is a mystery to me but I'm fairly sure I'm more balanced than most of my friends, even if I don't act like it. But I suppose a crazy person would view himself as sane.

I plan on talking to a few people today about a number of things but I would ask the few readers of this to talk to a friend and ask them how they feel. It's a weird thought, but a caring question can sometimes do a world of good.

Muah!
Lyrinoir

International WoW

Patti sent me an article about World of Warcraft yesterday. The rundown was that the game, of which I am a huge addict, has grown into this huge international monstrosity, picking up players in Asian nations and having unprecedented global appeal unlike anything since Mario. The total subscriptions number somewhere in the seven millions.

Upon receiving the article, I logged into my server of choice, Shadow Council is the name, and took a quick poll of the guild I am currently running with. For those of you who are running behind the times with the terminology of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games), a server is one of a few hundred copies of the main world of WoW onto which players are distributed to prevent hardware overload. A Guild is an organization of players who work toward a common goal. In most cases, guilds are formed by friends who want to access the endgame content which can require anywhere from twenty to forty real people working together to access.

My guild, Legends, is composed of mostly Americans hailing from the East Coast and a few from the Midwest. I'm about as far west as we go, however, there are also a few players from Australia and Great Brittan lurking about in the odd hours. We also have players from Texas and Montana in the US, Montreal and Quebec in Canada and a smattering of Ex-Pats in Africa and Central Europe.

Back when I played Final Fantasy XI, I had a few bilingual friends from Japan on my friend list but when it comes to international communities, nothing can top the collection of people in my WoW guild. And I talk to these people almost every other day. Thanks to a program called Ventrilo, Vent for short, we all can communicate in real time, talking about everything from game strategy to high politics. And while it is “just a game,” we can't help but feel a sense of camaraderie between us when we take on those huge burning bosses in one of the game's final dungeons.

I suppose I should put a disclaimer here that WoW is horribly addictive to the point where it can sometimes be not enjoyable anymore. This happens mostly when I stop playing for a week and try to come back and my brain explodes but other than that, this is one of the games I have continued to play for more than a year. All and all, there is much fun to be had but you have to watch how much you get involved.

And it helps that I got Aaron playing WoW now so we have another avenue of interaction. We're going to have lots of adventures!

Muah!
Lyrinoir

STORYWRITER

One of my new favorite pieces of music is the song, STORYWRITER by the Japanese pop group, Supercar. The song showed up on the Eureka seveN OST and it really is wonderful. It starts out all skippy and you think you need to hit your computer but then it hits YOU that it's supposed to skip. It's a lot like life in some ways. Now I know your saying, “Ooo, big life connection time. Yay...” but that would be really predictable of me and ultimately stupid.

You either get it right now or you don't. That's it. I have realized that it is stupid to berate the readers with obvious facts like the one above. And, of course, there is a story behind this little revelation. Cue the scene change.

There's this girl in my acting class, lets call her Tracy, who's very personality reminds me of the Goth Girls you see on television. This would be well and good except she wears bright colors and has light brown hair. But she comes off all goth-esq because she's quiet and says rather morbid things when she thinks no one's listening. So we had this reading assignment, Stanislavsky's “An Actor Prepares,” and during the class discussion of said reading the teacher asks Tracy to give her thoughts as to why Stanislavsky promotes exposing new actors directly to the stage as soon as possible. Tracy freezes for a moment and I can just see the little wheels turning in her head, processing the conversation up to that point. She finally opens her mouth and says “Well the answer is so obvious, I don't really want to talk about it.” And while Tracy was dropping Grade-A crap, the idea hit me in a strange way.

There are some concepts that normal humans can process regardless of common experience or personal bias. These feeling or concepts are so transcendent that talking about them can actually reduce their impact or kill them completely. So for someone like me who loves to write about everything, I have to draw a line between these personal things and the concepts that apply to everyone that are OK.

This blog was always meant to be more than a personal journal. I explore bigger emotional and philosophical topics though stories of the things that happen to me. Admittedly, the reason was a little selfish, in that I was the one getting the most out of the deal. The blog let me hold my life up to the mirror and learn from it. But recently, I've been drifting into more personal things than I really should be writing about. Not that my relationships are so private that I felt self-conscious. More that I don't feel that I have the right to waste space with things that don't have a meaning that everyone can relate to.

So I'm starting things over again, or at least putting a fresh coat of paint on everything. I have no idea what's going to happen next but I'm sure it's gonna be great. Stay tuned.

Muah!
Lyrinoir