not the movie. the sins. self-analysis coming up next. highly subjective. so sue me. below: the seven deadly sins in the order i stand accused. according to myself. definitions according to toma d'aquino and deadlysins.com.
greed - "the desire for material wealth or gain, ignoring the realm of the spiritual". i think i am the most non-materialistic person i know. i don't want things for the sake of wanting and i am completely immersed in the spiritual :). seriously now. i do want the one or other thing at times. and if i do, i work towards it. but i don't remember craving something so bad as to go out of my mind.
gluttony - "not any desire of eating and drinking, but an inordinate desire... leaving the order of reason, wherein the good of moral virtue consists". guilty as charged. damn hard to refuse a good icecream. long given up renouncing coke (yes, i am fully aware of the damage i do to myself). but i do not consider myself a real slave of the palate, so to say.
envy - "the desire for others' traits, status, abilities, or situation.". nope, most often not the case. i don't envy others for what they have and what they are, as i am mostly fully aware that it is senseless to do so, or that i can get my heart's desire. however, i do sometimes envy the ease with which some characters get what they want without apparent effort. but that immediately hauls me into another sin.
lust - "an inordinate craving for the pleasures of the body". in matters of my judging, i would be absolutely guiltless (yeah, isn't everybody?). in toma d'aquino's view... i don't indulge in bestiality and am not gay to my knowing. guilty as charged of "procuring pollution, without any copulation" and "not observing the natural manner of copulation". fancy speech, dude! have it your way.
sloth - "the avoidance of physical or spiritual work". oh, yeah, baby! funnily enough, others' reports on me on this issue vary greatly. and right they are. there are times when i embark myself on a mission, and give 150% to do it. some say i take on much more than i should. then again, there are times when i don't want to move a finger, let alone think... but honestly now... how many of you peeps out there seek out work for it's own sake... isn't that like... sick?!?!
anger - "manifested in the individual who spurns love and opts instead for fury. it is also known as wrath". guilty. i do not enjoy it, though, it means effort, and we've already agreed that i'm a sloth :). but, alas! i am angered more than i would like it. i am angered by stupidity. i am angered by narrow-mindedness. i am angered by arrogance. i am angered by what i perceive as social injustice. i am angered at myself for being greedy, gluttoneous, envious, lusty, lazy and, hell yeah! for being angry. and i presume that the fact that i mostly consider my anger justified doesn't lessen the guilt. neither does the fact that i'd oh so much rather not care...
pride - "excessive belief in one's own abilities, that interferes with the individual's recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. pride is also known as vanity". yippppiiiieee. yes! yes! yes! guilty. even if ever so often i indulge in self-pity and i swim in low self-esteem... vanity must be it. because deeeeeeep down inside i know i am so darn better than every idiot out there who i might at times envy, because i do consider my point just and my anger justified, because i am lazy, but i think i do enough and others should do more and i could just drone on and on...
and how was pacino's line in the devil's advocate? "vanity is my favourite sin" - and tell you what - lucifer was darn right too in his vanity. why play harp with the rest of the herd when you stand out in the crowd. according to deadlysins.com, i'll be broken on the wheel in hell (so if you can't break my morally in life, you'll break me physically in death?!?!) and the sin is linked with the colour violet and symbolised by the horse. well, being in the company of a great actor as al pacino and of horses, who are such magnificent and... well, yeah, proud animals... guess it's just the place i belong :)
welcome to another incoherent rambling by yours truly. i somehow have a distinct feeling in my stomach that this is what this is going to be (see? it's already started...).
some smartass tried to be funny yesterday when i was sharing my desire to go out and be silly in the rain, pointing out the eternal 'see? that's what money and society turn us into'. thank you miss. was aware of that before i had a chance to even start dreaming. learnt it too, for four years - just how subtle it works sometimes. are you aware of the ways you are manipulated into believing things or behaving in ways? i don't claim to be; but i probably beat you at it. which is no reason for me to be glad, trust me on that one.yeah, so i am another brick in the wall. i can shout out against the system till i run out of breath - what good will it to me? it's a wall that's too good cemented together for me to have an effect. all i do is waste breath and energy that could be put to better use elsewhere - like ducking my head in and making my position in the darn wall as comfortable as possible :)seriously now, there are only two ways to break a wall. on of them it an outside force greater than the wall's resistance. not recommended. it damages most of the bricks most of the time in a brutal manner. what's the use for a poor broken brick that it's finally free of the wall, when it's been pounded to pieces? the other one... well, that's all-powerful time. time wears down any wall; unfortunately, it too gnaws at the individual bricks. ever seen a solid brick wall worn down,
overcome by the green of vegetation, of life? it just goes to show that no wall is forever, they all will come tumbling down eventually. the only question is if the walls to come are better ones for the bricks that make them up... is the white house a better wall to be in than the palace of a mayan ruler? or is st. peter's dome a better wall than the ruins of glastonbury once were?
arrived here with my inner mumblings and mutterings i started listening to 'another brick in the wall'. all three of them. "i don't need no arms around me // and i don't need no drugs to calm me // i have seen the writing on the wall // don't think i need anything at all." these ones have always stuck a chord with me, ringing so... true. if i have nothing left to long for, if i stopped longing for growth - who or what can assure me that i am still alive and not given in to my
brick nature until i have indeed turned to stone... and yet, what can a brick do, ultimately?there is something that an individual brick can do. such a simple and easy to overlook answer: grow wallflowers. concentrate on life rather than a cold wall, put forth energy in that life. the roots plants strike will be an unhoped for aid in cracking the wall and relieving some of its pressure on the bricks.
what a glorious day... finally went to school, got bored to death. i hate classes where you just make notes and the teacher drones on and on and seems to mumble a lullaby at 8 in the morning. had the laptop with me, was writing 5 seconds and taking a break of 15 till the teacher resumed. one and a half hour dragged on forever. went for
a drink with lavi, then got home to catch up on (obviously) missed sleep. it was a marvelous day, walked to work through a summer sun. when i got there my mood improved even more. listening to the soundtrack of shrek might have something to do with that :) and then... the rain started. i just felt like running out, getting myself all wet, kick up the water in the puddles... behave really silly. instead, i threw open the windows and smelled the summer. cause that was the great cause for joy: it had been raining for days, but it was grey and bleak and opressive. this was the year's first true summer rain. :) welcome.
read again. it's cajones, not cojones. city of drawers - the old new hit of dali featuring freud; two screwed up geniuses team up and voila a masterpiece. love it, but don't necessarily agree. too many open drawers for my taste. too many drawers alltogether, actually. i don't think i store stuff in so many places. what i do know, though, is that i have a huuuuuuge closet. you wouldn't believe what's in there. but it's dark inside, and sometimes there are weird noises coming from it - i usually stay as far away from it as i can, just like a little child stays away from the basement. some of the stuff that i've thrown in there, i know of. other... heaven knows! or it had better not.
i pray the door holds fast. am not good at digesting stuff, i have the ostrich system that functions well; but if the door breaks down and everything comes tumbling... i picture it like in tom & jerry cartoons, when tom opens the door to the closet where jerry hid, and he is first hit in the head by that heavy bowling ball and then all the rest comes down on him, burying him underneath. yeah, that's a very good imagine of what would happen if the doors broke: i would probably be buried alive. no way i could crawl out of there by myself. no one i know of that could lift that weight from me; and am not the type of person asking for help either, even if i had the time to yelp for it while things fall around and all over me...
have talked to someone yesterday; it was a relief telling her some things, it always is talking to virtually strangers, though they'd have to be a certain type of person for me to be able to do it and she is. was relieved to find another closet-owner; but she is dealing with hers, she's put order in her drawers. i just throw stuff in
regardless of shelves - important thing is to get it out of sight, just like i do with clothes when tidying my room. so if you have any kind of belief and a spare prayer slot left... pray my doors don't break down.
though, judging by my latest doings, it's definitely more than one. first of all... well, most of the people who drop in here know about my little dragon obsession (no, this blog doesn't have freak written all over it, does it?) - just as well, millions have imaginery friends, and mine happens to be a dragon. i beg to differ ;) and now for the sad news for my sanity: i've written him a poem. i suck at epical stuff (there's a reason why a novel i started five years ago never came to more than 15 pages), but couldn't help it. if curiousity nibbles, you find it in the 'other lair' - link in 'places the dragon visits'. actually, i had very clear in mind what i wanted to say, carried it around for a couple of days... unfortunately, i think it kinda got lost in the writing.
quick explanation for the dragon-profanes out there: christian version: good ol' knights go slay dragons, a symbol of evil. fantasy version: dragons are old creatures of great power, a part of earth itself. slaying a dragon is thus a great crime. the story goes that many are blinded by faith and embark on quests to find and slay dragons and obviously few succeed. don't ask how, but probably through their telepathical powers, dying dragons convey to their slayer the sheer dimension of their deed. anyone with common sense would realise the mistake they made. the only way to heal the damage done is serve the true purpose of creation, of which dragons are a part, and for that the help of those very dragons is needed. now you go figure what it means to go kill a darn drake, have a sudden revelation, recover from the nervous breakdown of it, then look for another dragon,
tap it on its scaly shoulder and say "hey buddy, i have a problem. i just killed one of your kind, that was kinda oooops, will you join me in patch up this little mistake of mine for like... the rest of my life?". imagine the kind of person you'd have to be to come this far. and the imagine the kind of person you'd have to be for a dragon to accept you as... partner. bet saint george never made it. anyways, that was the idea. i bet it's not plain in the rhyming thing. guess i'll need endnotes again.
now for the second part of my folly. i have managed some degree of mastery of html. i decided to move on to css. had the helping hand of a friend send me a book. went through chapter one, applied what i learnt and... dunno. got this idea of learning flash. went through the first twenty pages of the book. was easy for who recommended it - the guy had his nose stuck in corel draw and photoshop for four years! i have only gotten so far as to put transparent background on gif's i use on sites... well, so i suppose i'd start learning photoshop. got damn user guide got 549 pages. am at page 29. and i need it. cause i did another crazy thing. link below.
so i ask you dear readers, to nag me day in and day out until you hear from me that i've reached page 548. i'll skip the content table. you'd do the world a favour, really. cause you don\t want anyone looking at pictures like these:
been assisting to loads of talk about religious issues lately. quoting live, 'heard a lot of talk about this jesus'... i am not what you would call a religious person. but i admire that man for what he preached; i think he was ages ahead of his fellow men and it pains me to say: i find him ages ahead of us still. a message so simple and so beautiful lost in a sea of interpretations, tortured, ruptured and divided among avid men, desecrated by petty ambitions and twisted human perceptions. that man was willing to die believing in love. we are willing to kill in the name of it. funny, huh?
i look at people arguing day in day out whether god is called yahwe or allah, whether one is allowed to eat meat or not, whether god is one or three persons and other aberrations i don't even care to remember... and to crown this monument of stupidity and self-infatuation: each is willing to decree his denomination as the ultimate true religion, each is the one and only bearer of belief in the one and only true god... like... how vain can a believer be to claim to posses god? and how vain a non-believer to deny his existence?
i am not a proper believer... i believe in something or someone, a creator, if you will. and i believe those happy who can establish a connection to their creator, who can feel his presence, if they perceive it as love. (i believe them tormented souls if they perceive a presence they revere in fear). i cannot feel him. i can see him looking at the sunset or watching the design of a leaf, i can hear him listening to birds sing or children laugh (even though i am not a fan of children).
but i cannot feel him with me or within me, not 
as a distinct someone. and yet i believe he (or maybe she...) talks to me directly when i watch all these things, in a manner that trancends language and beliefs, that goes beyond words and beyond what my mortal mind can contain. more than that: i believe that if i sit tranquill and talk to my self, my real inner self (listen to my heart or heed the voice of conscience in my head or whatever you wish to call it), a real private chat, no shows put up in public congregations - i believe i am talking to a god then, to that spark of life (s)he put inside this hull of flesh.
because it is only then when i am forced, sometimes against my will, to acknowledge my own worth and rise above the mud and the mire i've been wallowing in. how vain is that?!?!
do balrogs have wings? god, i love pointless questions. don't know about the balrogs. but chairs have dreams. and i am here to prove it (well not really. but i have to justify this blog entry somehow :) ). just please don't call me in the middle of the night to ask me this.just like humans, chairs can live in two different types of worlds. the world can be a dull and downright opressive, a black-and-white world if you wish, forcing one to find ever new means to satisfy escapist tendencies without getting into (serious) trouble (of course this doesn't work in 1984-type of worlds). or, the world can be your average every day grind - a colour world, where escapism is a perfectly normal way to keep you working as a little wheel in the big system, while at the same time allowing you to keep your personality intact. now, let's analyse the dreams of chairs in the two possible worlds.CASE STUDY 1 - the black and white world
the initial condition for a chair to start dreaming, is a rupture with the world it lives in. not fitting in the surroundings, no communication with other chairs, be it lack of chairs near the subject, or the existence of other types of chairs that reject communication with our subject, on grounds of its different nature. in other words, in order to start dreaming, a chair must feel alone in a black and white world.
the dreamt "escape" from the narrow-minded black and white world has two dimensions. first is that of the chair's inner world. we, as mere humans, can only begin to fathom the extent of a wooden chair's imagination, the height to which it takes the chair's inner self in its daydreams. neither can we graps the colour spectrum in which wooden chairs of various essences then perceive their otherwise dull b/w surroundings. we can only reach out with our inner eye and thus perceive a chair's dream of spreading imaginary wings and floating above the daily monochromy in levitation.
the other dimension of the chair's escape is the mutation its dreams and trips in imaginary worlds bring into its behaviour in the 'real world'. every chair capable of such dreams wears their mark that it cannot conceal, just as humans may not conceal their inner fire that will always shine through their eyes. sparks of higher spirits will burn through disguises. now, for the unformed human eye, such a manifestation in a chair is hard to detect, and yet there are signs for the willing to see. the drooping chair below is an example. its drooping board is just the obvious manifestation 'against the system' of straight lines that makes up its world. but there are other, more subtle clues. notice that its hind legs are showing, that it doesn't 'stay in line' either. it is a rebel chair in more ways that meet the eye and in that lies its chance of success. while the system might try to opress the obvious signs of rebellion, the more subtle ones will burn their way into the minds and hearts of others and subminate the system from inside.
CASE STUDY 2 - the colour world
as said, the colour world is your average daily grind. escapism is a must if a person - or chair, in our case - is to preserve its personality, its self, its sanity after all. again, as in humans, not all chairs mind being reduced to a wooden mass in a room. others do. and they dream. the image below is an eloquent example of such. remember le fabuleux destin de amelie poulain? there is that part where amelie's father, being too stuck in his routine, refuses to fulfil his life's desire and travel. amelie then 'dwarfnaps' his revered garden dwarf and sends him on travels with someone; her confused father keeps receiving pictures of his dwarf in various locations around the world that he himself desired to see. this is in short what this particular chair does. back to the wall, in a sunny yet unchanged place, it goes back to its spring of power. it rediscovers its green and very much alive inner tree nature, sprouts new leaves and grows out of itself. since it cannot move, it sends a part of itself on travels, to live the life it dreams for itself, to be its garden dwarf on the great adventure of life on which the chair itself cannot embark.
ps: photographs courtesy of bogdan h. more to be found here.
the ancient greeks believed that the worst thing that could happen to a person after death wasn't hell, or hades, but for the person's body to remain unburried. it was a crime against the gods to refuse a dead person the dignity and decency of a burial. that is the reason why achilles was punished by the gods: he mistreated the dead body of hector, refusing to return the body to the grieved father. in a life, you get to see many die: people, animals, a flower, a feeling. and i too believe that the decent thing to do, is to bury them. seeing that it is mostly feelings that lead us in life (yeah, go on fooling yourselves it is reason, if you will), i don't see a reason to treat them with less respect when they die.
i have known people who have mourned a dead friendship. or a dead relationship. or a dead feeling of happiness. the death of a good position in society. the death of the comfort of the nest. you name it. mourning is natural, it is part of the healing process. tears should seal up the scar of the heart and thus allow it to heal, just as the flowing blood seals up injuries of the body, allowing it to heal underneath. when the healing is done with as good as possible, it is natural for the scar to fall off and allow the body - or heart to go on.
and yet... i have seen people mourn all these things their due time... and then exceed it. and keep mourning, and pouring their life over the dead. deads don't awaken. it is useless. and wasting oneself over the dead is an insult (wasting oneself over dead people is an insult to the life they wanted but did not have the chance to live), fading over something long gone. postponing its burial until it rots and then lingering over something rotten instead of
cherishing a memory of something dear while it was still alive and beautiful means dying with the dead and is an insult to their memory - be it person, animal or feeling. the wheel keeps turning and no tear will stop it. offering something dead dgnity means bury it when it is time and move on, spin the wheel our way.
and there is a reason why the wheel spins. i have no idea what it is. but not knowing the why's doesn't relieve one of the duty of keeping going. of the reason i am sure. otherwise, we would just be unfortunate accidents. the worst of cynics claim we are. no shit, dudes? well, guess what: accidents don't happen at such a scale.
well, we all love meerkats. they are too cute not to be loved. but there is one person out there who is obsessed. and i hear a certain fellow named morty can testify to that. yeah, the people who matter know what i'm talking about. and especially who i am talking about. since i haven't updated in a while... and seeing that it's the 13th already... well, i thought that this post might just as well go out to you. and ignore the fact that this is going to sound pathetic: you are a very special person (and i'm not just saying that, people who know me half-way well can testify i don't go round saying things like that to people, though maybe indeed i should more often); you are one of the few (and i can really count them on my fingers and i'm not sure i'd have to use both hands) people i can really talk to and go as deep as it gets and not blush next time i meet you (or rather send a blushing emoticon...). i think you're one of the good guys and one of the few living humans (i know what i am saying... at least 70% of the alledged 6 billions are mere animals and i don't mean that as a compliment). you're a great guy and the only bad thing i can say about you is you are using a mac. well, i wish you a fun birthday tomorrow and may the year you step in be a great one. you deserve it. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!(oh, my dragon agrees. he dropped in for a word himself apparently. well, can't refuse such a beast.)
ps: i know this really doesn't belong here. i prolly shouldn't even mention it on joyous occasions. but today is the birthday of one of the few true friends i had - unwavering as only a dog can be: rocky would've been 17 today. may he rest in peace and may disney be right: all dogs go to heaven.
apparently, lately i am torturing my brain. that's pretty common, bet it's used to it by now and would probably miss it if i didn't, but i'm stretching its limits now. latest example was the thinking with a twist exercise. should've had some sort of positive impact, guess it did, but it still feels a bit like raping one's mind, forcing it to view in a positive light something that it usually finds utterly unpleasant.
on sunday, when walking home from work, i tried another thing. at first, unconscious, but then willingly. i started by noticing how deep blue the sky was on that particular day. one thing triggered another: i remembered a passage from eragon, when the main character gets a chance to see the world through a blue dragon's eyes: the blue seemed more intense and had more hues than he imagined, while the other colours were a bit faded. i tried picturing my surroundings making the blue stand out. i read somewhere about an exercise to train your brain: trying to count all white cars, or finding all red items in your office and so forth. this was a bit like that. i tried to notice only the blue things, and they were surprisingly many: the perfectly blue sky, traffic signs, people's clothes, patches on commercial meshes, cars, flowers in a flower shop... amazing.
and the thread of thought went on (does it ever stop?). i remembered i fairy tale i had listened to as a child on a vynil disc. as far as i recall, it was called
'the blue stone'. i don't remember it exacly, i don't think i ever understood the story properly as a kid. in a far away country, all people were given a blue stone at birth. for some reason, the emperor hated the blue colour. he let his men confiscate all blue stones. he called ravens to cover the skies. he covered the wells and made the river dirty, people with blue eyes had to cover them and so forth... no idea how the story went out, but whenever he thought blue was gone, someone reminded him that there is still something he can do nothing about... and i was just thinking how foolish it is to try to erase blue. and i think i like living in a blue world :)
not the movie. the sins. self-analysis coming up next. highly subjective. so sue me. below: the seven deadly sins in the order i stand accused. according to myself. definitions according to toma d'aquino and deadlysins.com.
sloth - "the avoidance of physical or spiritual work". oh, yeah, baby! funnily enough, others' reports on me on this issue vary greatly. and right they are. there are times when i embark myself on a mission, and give 150% to do it. some say i take on much more than i should. then again, there are times when i don't want to move a finger, let alone think... but honestly now... how many of you peeps out there seek out work for it's own sake... isn't that like... sick?!?!
