Oberlin, OH

Asthma is sent to certain people so they don’t take breathing for granted. If you can’t take breathing for granted, there’s not a lot you can take for granted. I’ve been having an attack and all I want to do is breathe, not much to ask for. It’s hard to lie down because the muscles I use to breathe while lying down are weaker than the ones I use while upright. But it’s hard to stay upright because that takes an effort and I lose my breath quickly.

I know two people for whom asthma is a part of their lives, unlike me - I only gets a major attack every once in a while. Everyday breathing isn’t a given for them, it’s a struggle. I wonder what that does to their perspective on life. Guess it depends on the person.

I wonder to what extent people control their own misery and to what extent they bring it upon themselves. I personally think that it is to a large extent, but I probably shouldn’t assume this applies to anyone else. It’s a pretty insensitive view. It’s my own personal explanation for my own perspective and understanding. OK?

I just think people bring misery upon themselves as personal challenges, to see how they survive against the worst they can do to themselves. People are born having already set the big challenges they will encounter in their lives. They already decided what they need to overcome and designed their lives so they would confront it and see if they could get through it.

Misery sucks, but it also feels so good to change a situation for the better. And for people who can’t rise up to their own challenge? This may be insensitive, but they live with their misery, even perpetuate it, and they steep in it, but I think they are learning something from it, or the experience and intimate knowledge of the misery helps them understand it better for the future. Another lifetime maybe.

Misery is personal and personalized, that’s why we always think we’re worse off than everyone else, because comparatively we are. Because our misery is our own and no one else’s. Maybe that’s what I mean by “bringing it upon ourselves”.

Besides the occasional asthma, disease isn’t a challenge for me in this life. Maybe it was before or maybe it will be. Poverty and money are also not a problem for me, maybe it was or will be, but it isn’t now. We pick and choose and life is Life no matter what the situation, it’s a constant. There is only one feeling of this physical reality and all the things in it, pleasure and pain, thought and existence in a space-time continuum, blood through our veins, air in our lungs, etc.

People drown in their misery and yet they insist on living for whatever good reason they may have. For me, that defies common sense, but who am I to say? It’s just me that can’t understand what is so valuable that you hold on even when things get so bad.

Sure suicide is escapist, it is an escape. That is why we have it, so that if things get too hot to handle, we hit the break-only-in-emergency glass, the abort switch, the eject button, the escape hatch. Otherwise people decide to live through their misery. The taboo against suicide exists as a cultural encouragement not to do it, it emphasizes that it really is the last resort. Whether there really are repercussions against suicide in the big picture, I have serious doubts. The truth is some of us challenge ourselves beyond our current capacity.

Me, I feel I’ve went too far this time. My problem is coping with myself and reality and other stuff I can’t grasp but is overloading every circuit in my board. But if I do get through this, it’s another step of progress in my series of lifetimes. Hooray for me.

Oberlin, OH

There’s a double-standard for death. If I died by accident, people would mourn, bury me, and get on with their lives. But if I killed myself, there are all these questions and there’s a horror to it. There may be feelings of anger, maybe regret . . . whatever. Why can’t people treat suicide just as they would if it was a death by some accident? Mourn the dead person, bury the dead person, get on with your lives. No questions asked, no haunting regrets. What? You couldn’t prevent the bus from running over him and his dog? Well, you probably couldn’t prevent her from slashing her wrists in the bathtub.

I hope no one mourns over me, they can mourn for themselves alright, but spare me. I wouldn’t have killed myself because I was depressed or giving up, I would have done it as the next logical step in my existence. Mourning that achievement doesn’t make sense, almost insulting. What makes me feel so important that I think people would mourn my death?

So why do I write about this? Am I being insensitive about the topic? Am I trying to convey that it’s just a fact, just another act? Maybe I’m writing about it because I couldn’t talk about it. If I talk about suicide, the natural reaction would be for someone to be concerned, whether they knew me or not, I don’t want anyone to be “concerned”.

The average person isn’t expected to be able to think away physical maladies, like cancer. In the same way, I don’t think the average person should be expected to be able to think away insanity or suicidal tendencies. Someone with a mental disease dies from it, but the form of death looks like a suicide. Mental leap. It looks like a choice to commit suicide, but dying from cancer is never seen as having been a choice.

Medical science isn’t established knowledge, it’s knowledge of the establishment, and its ubiquity and all-knowingness is self awarded. And the fault of medical science is in what it thinks is its strength. Something is fact because it can be proven, and if it can’t be proven, it isn’t fact. So if it can be proven that someone died of cancer, it’s fact. But if it can’t be proven that someone died of mental disease, that’s not fact, and so instead it’s suicide. And since society can’t handle that, they make it illegal.

Oberlin, OH

I’m sick. I told myself that if I couldn’t get these papers done by Friday, I would go talk with the professor and tell him that I really, really, simply just can’t do the papers. But then my efforts were scuttled by my body trying to sabotage my efforts. But I ain’t giving up yet, I’m going to put a noble effort into this. I got asthma pretty bad on Thursday and Friday, whenever I was able to get out and move about, I thought I would collapse or whatever.

I went to a Steel Drum Ensemble rehearsal because I was feeling a bit better and it really rocked. Our show is going to be on Friday at the Cat in the Cream and I feel pretty good about it. It’s been a long time since I’ve really performed in a group, and playing in a group is SO much more fun than playing alone.

The ‘rents are back from a trip to China. They called and it was barely bearable, they’re still talking out of two sides of their faces, they can’t be thinking I’m buying it. They just can’t. They sent money a few days ago, along with, for the first time, a LETTER! I couldn’t even read it, I read the first line of each paragraph to get the gist and then chucked it. It was too weird having them trying to communicate like that after all this time. If they ever wanted to communicate, they should have started a long time ago and it’s way too late now.

We’ve never talked or anything. Anything said between us has been for practical communication or small talk, never discussion for the sake of discussion and I think it’s bullshit if they think things can change just because they all of a sudden decide to. I couldn’t get used to it and since they established it, I don’t see any reason why I should let anything change. I’m used to non-communication and I like it that way.

I had a dream a couple of nights ago. A bunch of people I knew were playing team hide and seek in the cemetery. I was on the hiding team and I couldn’t be caught. I was being chased at the time I woke up, but I couldn’t be caught. The following day I dreamed a cat had gotten into my room and woke me up by sitting on my chest. I was afraid it was going to scratch me even though I love cats, and I had difficulty kicking it out since I’m allergic to cats. I got it outside of the room but it made moves to get back in and I woke up just as I was slamming the door on it. I think they’re both death dreams. There was something morbid and dark about the cat and that’s why I was uncharacteristically afraid of it. But I don’t see my death happening before two years from now, so I don’t know why I’m having dreams about it now.

Oberlin, OH

I wonder why I think what I think, what are the sources of ideas? What recognizes what’s real and what’s not?

I am looking for someone. I am looking for a person with whom I don’t have to try, where the basic, vital element of communication is automatically there.

Whose words were they? Who was it that told me that the pursuit of life is constant? That statement was so strong and it was given to me by a passing stranger who I’ll never see again. “The pursuit of life is constant”. Was that sent to me for a reason? Is it justifiable to abort one lifetime to continue that pursuit?

I wonder if we can’t imagine an infinite universe in time and space because our human nature is finite. Our perception of the universe is simply a projection of our perception of ourselves. I’ve always had trouble with the concept of nothing existing before the universe was formed. Everything is contained in the universe, so how can there ever be a time when the universe didn’t exist and how can the universe have boundaries, implying there is something else (“nothing”) beyond those boundaries?

Yet we have the Big Bang Theory telling us that is when the universe came into existence and they also tell us that the universe is expanding, implying that it is expanding into or in some other space. How can there be nothing and how can there be that “other space” if, by definition, the universe is the whole thing and everything?

Before time began, there was no time and before space began there was nothing. It’s easy to theorize, but can anyone really conceive it? Since we are something, can we really grasp “nothing”? To grasp nothing we’d have to negate the something that grasps it. Bleah.

Our lives have definite starts and have limited boundaries of existence, so we impose that upon the universe. The universe exists because of our projection of it. We can’t experience life without us, but we take it on faith that there was life went on before us and will go on after us. Easy to theorize, impossible to experience. So maybe once we leave this limited life and go back to our infinite forms, we’ll understand the infinite universe with sequences, the Big Bang being the start of only one of them.

Scientific studies that show “evidence” that the universe is “expanding” may be a misreading of data. An interpretation of observations using our limited language of science. When a complex language is translated into a simpler language, the faults of the translation extend to the faults and shortcomings of that language.