Number one idle.

This just in: excluding detail is no easier on the conscience than lying.
It's amazing how we rationalize our decisions with technicality, like it's a fucking game. I quit.
It hurts being selfless. But sometimes it hurts not to be.
I'm selfishly selfless.

And I've made changes, the right kind. And I'm gonna be happy. And I already am.
But part of me is healing. And there's not much more I can say about it.

Today my friend Christopher asked me what women want.
First I told him, I don't know, ask a woman.
But then I thought for a minute.
Not too long ago I developed a smell fundamental set of ideal circumstances for myself, not to expect but to live toward.

1. I want to be able to be many places at once.
2. I want there to always be something to do.
3. I want there to always be someone to do it with.

power, pleasure, positive regard. I don't know if that's what women want, but that's what I want.
I don't think anyone would complain about having any of those things.

I learned something recently courtesy ted.com that might just change my life forever. And that is, that happiness is synthetic. The human mind is conditioned to adapt extremely well to situations, and make the best of what it's dealt.
That makes me incredibly optimistic. You're telling me that next week I could be confronted with my worse fears, the most traumatic situations and soon, I'd be fine.
How does this not make you leap out of your seat?

Science has proved it, everything is gonna be alright. This is nuts. This is MAD.

Also.
Decided today sex doesn't matter till you're in love.

Gonna start writing more.

second guessing.

The wait of the world.

No one tells you that when life happens, it doesn't stop happening.

I suppose I should elaborate on this statement.

When you're exposed to something, there's no dis-exposure. It's a chemical reaction. It's a scrambling of an egg.
It's the baking of a cake, maybe one you want to have as well as eat. Coming up from a pretty low low can be...well...slowed if not completely impeded by the lowness of the low, the novelty, the recency. It's hard to say things are good when there's something always a hidden still-recovering section of you in the back of your mind.

But it's hard to say things are bad when you're only in the meantime.

I'm mixing my feelings here. I'm mixing emotions and thoughts and events, but I know I'm just hiding from something very obvious that is happening to me. I hide behind all this cryptic nonsense because I am afraid to archive the truth knowing that in the very near future, it could change, and as counterintuitive as it may be, I fear inconsistency.
I am afraid of changing something that isn't harming me in order to gain something that could make me a happier person, because there is more to be considered than just how I feel. I am afraid of inflicting harm, because I am afraid of guilt.
I am afraid of the selfish person that I'm being.

I'm in a situation that's hard to get out of.
I wish I could stay here.

But I fear regression.

I have come to the conclusion that life doesn't stop happening once fear is involved. Fear perpetuates life.
Life perpetuates regression.

I'm still living, still learning
Despite fear, I still know that the grass is green.

The strangest thing happened to me.

One minute, I'm a care-free, yellow backpack and too much free time having, songbird communications, major smiling at everyone I see.
The next, I'm an employed 8-5er, regular commuter, malnourished, unhappy victim of anxiety.

Okay, so maybe the shift didn't happen quite that quickly. But damn, did I make a behavioral 180 from last month's Amalie.

I guess I decided on impulse to take on more responsibility as a result of the things I was feeling when I posted my last entry. Bad idea. Too big of a change, not ready for life to happen yet. But it's okay, I'm adjusting where I can and healing more than that.

That's not what I came here to talk about, though. i just feel like it's an important detail for understanding my frame of reference.

If you've ever used a virtual map, you know that zooming out, or changing your frame of reference gives entirely new meaning to the location you're assessing. The idea of recursiveness is basically, an idea repeating on a different scale -- that encompasses all preceding levels of that idea.

Yannow?

1! 2! 3! ...

No, I'm not yelling numbers at you. These are factorials.
1! is 1
2! is same as saying 2*1
3! is the same as 3*2*1
4! is 4*3*2*1

So basically, 4! is the same as 4*3! and 3 is 3*2!
With each increasing "level", you're incorporating one new element, and the rest exclusively elements of the preceding level.

I came here to talk about things that are recursive.
I don't know if I'm the only one that this happens to, but I feel like life is full of motifs. Sometimes, you learn something, and it just keeps coming up on your life, and it doesn't sustain in frequency for an extended period of time, but it seems like it coincidentally shows up a lot in the small amount of time after its frequency is exposed.

And lately, my motif is the idea of recursiveness.

I first was able to identify this motif last week during my rhetoric class when we were talking about Andy Warhol. A few words about the guy: he's a business artist. The question posed to us was, whether giving people a pretty picture that meant nothing was "art." The conclusion is that the art isn't in the object itself, but the fact that the object has no meaning is meaningful. Therein lies the art. Another conclusion is that the meaninglessness is calculated. And therein lies the art. A step out even further, a collective attempt at attributing artistic qualities to something without meaning is "art." And further than that, the ability to identify and make judgments about this collective attempt is art.

It's a cool thought, but why do you care, Amalie?

Because. Battling anxiety is recursive.
The first level is the actual stress. Your body basically stresses out a couple times, then it realizes "hey I'm getting stressed out a lot lately" and starts to behave as if it is always stressed out. For the person newly victimized by their own bodies, who isn't sure what happened, this creates the second level of stress that can almost go unnoticed. But not quite, people who are at all in tune with their minds (people with anxiety are extra in-tune as a result of the hypersensitivity) will start to notice things changing, and not be able to attribute them to anxiety because they are usually unfamiliar with the symptoms. They will start to make their own hypotheses about what is going on with them, and will usually assume the worst. This essentially confers for the nervous system that is already stressing about stressing about stress. And a fourth level is added.

I feel as if I have at least arrested the development of my own anxiety, because I have been fortunate enough to have someone very in my life who dealt with anxiety and all its physical manifestations, and was able to identify reasonably early on that I am not dying.

[Maybe another day when this has all blown over, I'll blog about what it was like to feel like you were dying for those couple weeks before my self-diagnosis.]

Interestingly enough, this concludes my post.
Sucks, huh?
It sucks having all these problems presented to you and being able to identify them as what they are but not having the satisfaction of closure, the happy ending I know at some point I'll be able to tell about in hindsight.

I live that right now.

But that's not what I came here to talk about.
It just comes out.

I relinquish all efforts to exploit such control.

There comes a time every month or two in this woman's life where it seems like I have many, many great ideas.
I'm full of great ideas.

So fucking what.

I had a midlife crisis this week, I think. I've come to realize that I don't know what I'm doing, or where I'm going. I'm just one of those kids spending my parents money at a big public university with no particular goal in mind.
I have goals, but I can't score all of them. And that seems to somewhat discourage me from scoring any.

But I feel like I need to take a few minutes and just think about everything. Talk about everything. Before I start studying for midterms in classes that I don't even know if I'm gonna need.

Probably the greatest source of discomfort I've been having lately is the inability to trust. The more you trust someone, the more they trust you -- and you learn about them. I feel if you know too much about someone, their tendencies become exacerbated in obviousness because once you have identified these qualities, your perception of them materializes and only grows. So when you know that someone very close to you has betrayed the trust of someone else, it's difficult to not be on guard.

I think for a while, I suppressed the notion of the possibility of being betrayed, and that was very, very comfortable. But I realized that I don't want to live suppressed, and I don't want to be controlled, or at the mercy of the people that I love and fear losing.
I don't want to be a passenger seat driver. I'm a big girl, and I have my own fucking car.
Except I don't, but that's just literally.

So recently, I tried being a little less accommodating and a little more self-serving.
Frankly, it sucks.

I like having something else to live for. But I guess that slipped my mind that ultimately, we all live for our own ends, and it just so happens that my well-being ends depend on the happiness of the others as means.

We create our own stars.

Also I have been thinking a lot about identity and its construction and weather cognition of said construction is something to be frowned upon or respected. We live in a world that's heavy in encouragement of the creation of physical manifestations of the self.

My conclusion is that we live to be perceived.
And it sucks that I've realized this, because now I'm aware that I have some element of control over the way I'm perceived. And I don't like that. I don't want that. I can't handle it. And I relinquish all efforts to exploit such control.

The idea is, that the less one perceives this perception, the better they can fulfill their role of being.
So here we go. Abandon this knowledge, and we're back to square one.
Live. Be.

So said cognition should be neither respected nor frowned upon. But not disregarded. Gauged.
Be in tune.

I have fun. And that's what the fuck I'm doing with my life.
One foot in every door.

Fate implies means, and means implies ends.

I know I should probably be spending this chunk of the two and a half hours I have before class more wisely than on a blog entry, but my mind has been infiltrated with thoughts and if I don't get them down and out, I won't be able to process anything else today.

Hello collectivity.

Hello bottom-up implementation of societal norms.

Hello web.

I read something very tangible to me today on facebook, of all places.

To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.

I want to delve a little deeper into a specific idea in this quote, and that is the presence of fate.

Let's just talk about the idea of fate.

Fate is defined as "the development of events beyond ones control."

Most of the time, we look at this definition and see "beyond ones control" and if there is any discrepancy with the idea of fate it lies there. Most of the time.

This time, I want to look at the former excerpt, "the development."

Fate is not an end. It's not the hindsight, or the recollection. It's the development.

Fate is the means.

Fate implies means, and means implies ends.

Humans are crazy, crazy creatures. It doesn't take something happening to gather emotions about it, or feelings toward it. It just takes the materialization of the idea.

We are creatures who get by on suppression. Sometimes we are faced with foresight and intuition that we don't like. We get by because we have conditioned ourselves into mastering the art of suppression.

I have, anyway. Maybe I shouldn't speak for all of us.

And it doesn't make me better. That makes me worse.

But who likes to think about the end?

Who likes to think about demise and cessation?

I'm not strong enough.

To believe in fate takes a strength that I don't have.

I am too free.

So here we go: I don't believe in an end, really.

I believe in unity.

I believe everything emulates a brain.

Connections, connections, connections.

Look at the world, at how we operate on a day-to-day basis.

What are you doing RIGHT now? If you're reading this, you're on a computer screen which is connected to a bunch of hardware which is connected to wires which are connected to a wall.

The progress of the world is the exponential growth in connections.

That's beautiful.

Since the beginning of time, we've been trying to make things a little easier. To create order out of chaos, so to speak. This chaotic mess that we're in that some like to call earth, is one big brain that's right in the the middle of evolving.

All of the brains in the world, in the history of humanity, have been collectively working to make...

a big fucking brain.

So what are we? And what's inside our brains that we can't see?

It always goes back to identity with me, doesn't it?

Oldie but a goodie.

somebody get me out of this box, before I lose dimension and become a square,
I'll fall flat to the ground just like I was never there.

somebody take me to the clouds, give me some perspective, to help me see
that I am but a tiny ant, and the higher I get the closer you are to me.

somebody take me far away, engage me while we're on the interstate.
take me somewhere undisclosed so i don't notice we're driving in figure 8's.

somebody just take control, hold my hand and show me where to go.
I have no ambition or direction, i just know I can't so this on my own.

remind me again why I'm still here,
why I'm a balloon tied to the table. who the hell is on my shoelace and why am I unable
to float away? why wait another year?

I'll abandon it all and reach out my hands,
and just float above the distant lands.

And. Just. Float.

This is intuition.

Today I thought about the world and how little we came from.

thoughts

There has to be a God.

There's got to be something that understands all.

Maybe God is just the idea of understanding it all, but even that exists somewhere in this multiverse.

Knowledge is crazy to me.

Especially knowledge of the idea that something can exist even though we don't perceive it, though we are born not understanding that.

Maybe humans have different strengths of realization of this simple concept. The point at which we suddenly understand that just because something goes out of sight, it is still there.

Maybe those who are weak are happy.

Maybe those who are strong are intuitive.

Let's fucking paint.

What I have found.

Today I'm looking at life as a series of journeys to treasures unknown.

In the last month of so of being home, I have found many, many things that I wish to share.

In my life, I will find more things

And in my life, I will wish to share.

I wish to share.

I have found knowledge. As children, we are bound by confines of finite understanding no less than we are now, but we lack perception of such confines and can thus not further our knowledge with that filter. When we are children, things are true, or untrue. Black and white.

And it is only when we understand the greyscale and all the colors of the rainbow that we can begin to learn.

I have found humility. The bounty of knowledge is impressive, vast, powerful, but mostly humbling. Through discovering how few things I know, and how few ways I know them, I have come to realize that I'm a speck of sand on the oceanside.

I have found security. I can adapt and be happy without most things in my life, provided I continue to suppress the adaptations to having them. I don't need to look down. I don't need to judge. I'm better than that.

I've found harmony. It is interesting to draw the parallel between my style of music creation and my interactional tendencies with people. I find myself drawing certain aspects more out of myself depending on the environment I am. I am multifaceted and multi-interested. My way of living is harmony.

I will create. I will experience. I will share. I will learn. I will grow. I will love and be loved.