Various musings on the Holiday Season

Well folks, it's that time of year again.....the Holiday Season rush. It just never ceases to amaze me about how crazy people go over "Black Friday" shopping ordeals. Personally, I'd rather eat my dog's poop than get caught out in the chaos associated with the day after Thanksgiving. Have the holidays become so commercialized that the only thing people obsess about is the gift giving and receiving? I'm not Christian so when Fox News talks about "The War On Christmas", they are talking about people like me.

It's not that I'm anti-X-Mas (which I jokingly pronounce as Ex-Mas in the tradition of Futurama), it's just that I don't buy into the whole thing. I personally celebrate the Pagan tradition of the Winter Solstice and rejoice in the fact that the days cease being shorter each day and begin the long, slow build up to Spring and Summer once again. Anyone who knows me well, knows of my views on Christianity and organized religion as a whole. Don't get me wrong, religion serves a very important function in society, I just don't want to have any of it in my government, to have it pushed upon me all the time or be judged as lacking a soul and going to Hell because I don't believe in God or Jesus Christ. It never ceases to amaze me how certain people become irritated or angry because I wished them a happy holiday seaon instead of a Merry X-mas. Not everyone is Christian people and I don't feel comfortable with wishing anyone a happy birth of their savior day. Scholars have pretty much proved that proven that Jesus Christ was not born on the 25th of December and that the holiday was moved to that date to coincide with various Pagan and Roman festivities.

At a quick glance it would appear that I am very cynical and jaded about the holidays and find absolutely no value in celebrating them. This is not the case though. I do believe that the holiday season should exist as a time where family and close friends come together and celebrate the common bond that we have with each other. I rather enjoy holiday gatherings and parties that I have the chance to attend. I feel that these sort of events really embody the holiday spirit in the place of a massively commercialized religious event. This time of year I celebrate Peace, Love and Happiness and if that offends people, that's there loss and I invite them to reflect upon what the holidays really mean to them.

Perception and Reality

I got to thinking about reality the other day and found it very difficult to quantify what reality really is. Reality is so often based in perception that it's difficult to tell what is real and what is skewed due to our point of view.

Think about it, everything that we experience everyday is subject to interpretaion based upon our points of view. This naturally raises a lot of questions with me in regards to how I react to situations on a daily basis and how I view myself in general. It's far too easy in life to get wrapped up in our own lives thinking that our point of view or perceptions are the only ones that are correct. I find that it's very helpful to be mindful that things often aren't quite what we perceive them to be.

Often I can choose as to how I want to view or react to both positive and negative situations that present themselves. The more that I look at or react to things in a positive way, the happier and more trouble free I find myself. This is a key realization for me, a great deal of being happy in life is taking the time to examine how you look at things. Beforehand I was far too busy wrapped up in my troubles and worries that I lost sight of what it means to truly live. Things finally degenerated to the point where I didn't want to carry on and soon after I was faced with a very important questions: If I were to go foreword, was I going to dedicate myself to being happy or was I just going to continue on with being miserable and feeling sorry for myself?

Fortunatley I made the right choice and I've spent the last 6 months trying to change the way that I see and experience life's challenges and experiences. I choose how I decide to view things, I choose my attitude everyday, I choose to make my own reality based upon a new sense of perception. I'm not going to lie and say that it's easy or that I'm completely successful everyday, I have years and years of bad habits to shake and that just doesn't happen overnight. Things like work, a lack of much of a social life and some lingering self esteem issues often present challenges to me in my journey. The important thing is that I stand in the shower everyday and tell myself that I'm going to be as positive as I can be, not let things bother me and smile as much as possible. I can honestly say that this has helped me immensely and I think the people who I interact with have noticed this change in me. I have to be mindful at all times to keep from slipping into old habits and thought patterns but as long as I remain mindful and open, it really isn't that hard and I am enjoying life as viewed through the new set of reality glasses that I recently put on! As time goes foreword, hopefully I will automatically see things positively without having to be so mindful all the time, that being said, I think that being mindful is a good thing, it gives a clarity to our reality and helps us to gain a greater understanding of life's daily events.

Finding somewhere you belong.....

There is a Song by Linkin Park named "Somewhere I belong" that sums up how I've felt all my life so well that it's unbelievable. Here are the lyrics:

(When this began)
I had nothing to say
And I get lost in the nothingness inside of me
(I was confused)
And I let it all out to find
That I'm not the only person with these things in mind

(Inside of me)
But all that they can see the words revealed
Is the only real thing that I've got left to feel
(Nothing to lose)
Just stuck, hollow and alone
And the fault is my own, and the fault is my own

I wanna heal, I wanna feel
What I thought was never real
I wanna let go of the pain
I've felt so long
(Erase all the pain till it's gone)

I wanna heal, I wanna feel
Like I'm close to something real
I wanna find something I've wanted all along
Somewhere I belong

And I've got nothing to say
I can't believe I didn't fall right down on my face
(I was confused)
Looking everywhere only to find
That it's not the way I had imagined it all in my mind

(So what am I?)
What do I have but negativity?
Cause I can't justify way everyone is looking at me
(Nothing to lose)
Nothing to gain, hollow and alone
And the fault is my own, and the fault is my own

I wanna heal, I wanna feel
What I thought was never real
I wanna let go of the pain
I've felt so long
(Erase all the pain till it's gone)

I wanna heal, I wanna feel
Like I'm close to something real
I wanna find something I've wanted all along
Somewhere I belong

I will never know
Myself until I do this on my own
And I will never feel
Anything else until my wounds are healed

I will never be
Anything till I break away from me
I will break away
I'll find myself today

I wanna heal, I wanna feel
What I thought was never real
I wanna let go of the pain
I've felt so long
(Erase all the pain till it's gone)

I wanna heal, I wanna feel
Like I'm close to something real
I wanna find something I've wanted all along
Somewhere I belong

I wanna heal, I wanna feel
Like I am somewhere I belong
I wanna heal, I wanna feel
Like I am somewhere I belong
Somewhere I belong


Another very dark song that rang very strongly with me. This is just another prime example of the place that I am making my way out of at this point in time. A sense of belonging is something that every human being strives for in lifw. For most of my life I've never felt like I've ever been anywhere that I truly belonged and that is most certainly a very bleak thing. Looking back on the person I was a mere 6 months ago, I see that I was very negative. Not only was I very negative, I was extremely jaded and cynical about just about everything in the world. How are you supposed to be a happy person with that kind of attitude?

Being ostracized by family and peers growing up had a very powerful influence on my perceptions and how I acted. I learned that participation yielded scorn, ridicule and guilt, thus I switched from an attitude of participation to one of observation. If you didn't get involved in things and relationships and merely observed and didn't interact, you didn't get hurt. It's no wonder that I never felt like I belonged anywhere, I was forever observing things as an outsider for fear of appearing vulnerable and getting hurt.

This sort of attitude has proven to be a very difficult one to shed over time. I can honestly say that I am no longer nearly as negative, cynical or jaded as I once was but I still find it difficult to switch from an attitude of observation to interaction. One thing that helped dramatically was my experience at the therapy center that I stayed at for 6 weeks late this Spring and early Summer. It was there that I had the chance to get to know people who had similar problems and attitudes as my own. The more vulnerable I was, the more people there accepted me. It was a very enlightening and gratifying experience for me, for the first time in my life I felt like I truly belonged. Though I do have to admit that there is one yearly experience that I attend that makes me feel the same way, that would be the 3 day Dave Matthews Band concert at the Gorge. Being there with thousands of people that share the passion that I have for the band is liberating every year but it's too short lived and easily forgotten over time.

Feeling like you belong where you live is a very powerful thing as well. When I lived in Bozeman in the 90's I truly came to love the city and almost felt like I belonged there. When I moved to Spokane for my clincal internship that feeling evaporated overnight and forgot what it was like. When I moved to Kauai I hoped that I could regain some of that feeling of belonging....I couldn't have been more incorrect. Though Kauai is a very beautiful place, there is much racial tension between the natives and the white population. This is very understandable since we have literally invaded the Hawaiian islands, filling them up with condominiums and Winter homes. This drives up the price of everything and locals are always crowded out by their more wealthy white counterparts. I wasn't even remotely prepared to deal with the predjudice that I would encounter on the island. The Hawaiian culture is a very beautiful one but it has been tainted by hate and bigotry and this makes me very sad. I felt like I was continually assaulted the entire time I lived there. I'm not saying that it's unbearable and no one should move there, I was just too sensitized to it due to my upbringing.

I've been home for over 3 years now and I had a revelation about a month ago.....I feel like I belong here in Missoula and I'm very happy to feel that way about a place again. I still don't feel like I really fit in very well at work but I'm doing my best to change that attitude over time. I still have a tendency to observe instead of interact with people, I'm doing it now as I sit in the window of my coffee shop watching people go buy. I'm still struggling with making friends, I have most of my life so it's unreasonable to expect that to change overnight. The important thing is that I love it here in Missoula and for the first time in over 10 years, I'm not thinking about where I am going to move next.

A sense of belonging is a very important thing in life and I strive for it everyday. Once again, the important part is that I continue to strive and continue to grow. Being healthy and happy takes a lot of work and it's important to look back on things and see how far you have come. In my case I'm making up for about 38 years of negativity but it's never too late to start and it's always worth doing!

I love pop culture, I hate pop culture, I love geek culture

I've been in my career for just over ten years now and I seem to spend a lot of time reflecting on the person I was back then and who I am now. One thing that I find very interesting is how much different my take on pop culture is now as opposed to how it was ten years ago.

People's view points change as they get older, that is pretty much a fact. Ten years ago I used to work for Hastings Books, Music and Video on the side while I was finishing my clinical internship in Spokane. You could pretty much say that I was pretty immersed in all things pop culture back then. I listened to the music that was cool back then, I watched all the movies that were cool and I still watched a lot of mainstream television. These days I don't even watch television anymore and am lucky if I see more than 5 movies in the theater a year or even rent DVDs. A lot of things have changed in ten years, digital music is now the mainstay of music sales and I buy over 90% of my music off iTunes. Television is now dominated by the phenomenon known as "Reality Television". Words cannot even begin to describe the level of disdain I have for reality television. I could spend an entire blog on just how bad and fake I feel it is and how it's having a negative effect on the American culture as a whole, but I'm just going to leave it at that for now. "Celebrity as Celebrity does" is also supersaturating the entertainment media anymore with far too many people being famous just for being famous, not because they are talented or accomplished in any way shape or form. People actually worship these "Celebrities", hell the entire "E" channel is devoted to nothing but these people and reality television and it really disgusts me.

I really have become disillusioned with pop culture and I have grown up in many ways. I refuse to have my tastes dictated to me largre corporations who prepackage everything from television to music and then tell the American public that they aren't cool if they don't like whatever crap they are selling that particular week. I prefer to go my own way, form my own opinions and place my devotion to things that I feel mean something or are trying to make a difference in the world somehow. All of the above really does feel very negative in nature but it's genuinely how I feel about it and I have decided that the best way for me to stay positive about things is to pretty much unplug as much as possible.

One thing that I am rather happy about is the fact that geek culture is flourishing in this day and age and that it's finally far more socially acceptable to be a geek or nerd. I have to admit that I'm an old school geek/nerd, whatever you want to call it. It just amazes me how much geek culture has gained foothold in mainstream society now. Movies that I thought were awesome back in the 80's are finally getting their due in society. It's no longer considered to be uncouth to be a fan of things like the X-Men or Spiderman. Video games are more popular than ever and show no signs of declining anytime soon.

So while on the one hand, I feel that pop culture has gotten way too out of hand but at the same time I love the fact that geek culture is finally starting to take the stage. I plan on continuing to follow those things that genuinely hold my interest, not because it's cool to do so. I strongly encourage everyone else to look at things in similar fashion and possibly turn a critical eye to the group mentality and show more initiative by going your own way!

Fear and Loathing in downtown Missoula

It never ceases to amaze me about how clueless I can be about the goings on of the world around me. I came downtown tonight to my usual coffee shop haunt to journal and blog only to find hordes of people milling about the streets dressed up like dead people. The line in the coffee shop was ten times longer than I've ever seen it, but one of the baristas spotted me in the line and asked if I was having my usual (I tip every time when I'm in here so that certainly paid off tonight). I asked him what was going on and he said that it's "The Day of The Dead" and that a parade was going to start in about 30 minutes. Really? That would explain all the people dressed up like dead people standing around expectantly. I had to ask a young college student if she would move her stuff off an empty chair in the window, she gave me a withering look like I had large, herpes infected pustules ready to erupt at any moment on my face but she moved her stuff for me so I could have my preferred window seat for people watching. I got my journaling done and now the parade is streaming past. Wow, I didn't know they made inflatable, buffalo shaped sex toys as large as a bus these days. I have no idea what you would do with such a thing or what it has to do with dead people, but one just went by. There goes a woman with a rainbow, lightup hula hoop, I don't even think I would have to be high to enjoy a hip gyrating performance of that. It never ceases to amaze me the places people will bring their dogs in public. I see two couples together with 4 very large dogs standing out there. If I brought the terrierists to this sort of thing, I'm pretty sure that they would find a way to set fire to the parade and wreack havoc upon an unsuspecting crowd. Hey look, there's that woman who works at Target that looks EXACTLY like my ex-wife. I swear she's in there every time I'm in Target, I can feel her watching me, I think she's stalking me. Maybe I should marry her so she kind find her true love in the bridal party just like my last wife did. That wasn't cynical, I'm a great matchmaker in that respect. Well, I think I'm going to enjoy the rest of the parade and stop the "Fear and Loathing".