THERE IS A POINT FROM WHICH THERE IS NO RETURN

TACTICAL

I have given a bit of thought to what is on my mind and since this is my airing of dirty laundry in public, I have had some recriminations about talking about my thoughts.  Other than the things that “I think that I am thinking about”, I am doing well.  As my year started out similarly to the roll out of the ACA, I have kept plugging away at my goals and like the ACA, things have slowly developed into being better than anticipated.  For example:

I am confident going into my last quiz in Intermediate Algebra on Wednesday that I will have earned a “B” for the term.  The feeling that I have reminds me of what Taylor Mali said in his epic reply about what a teacher makes.  And the heart of my entry, of my journaling, of my purest essence, is that working diligently towards a noble goal is often its own reward.

With my ONE class taking up so much of my time, there is not a lot of “disk space” for interpreting the meaning of subjective communication.  Before my injury, when there was something that I did not “get”, it was always relative to whatever the something was tied to, interactions and perspective, anything that did not had no direct point of reference for and I truly was not “getting” was usually something that I was not invested in.  I mean, I used to get why it bothered my starter Wife when I would say that “I’d rather jack my d*ck with a handful of razor blades…” than go visit with her at one of her girlfriend’s house as a complete conversation, but for me to break things down into simple bite-size pieces, it simply was not worth the effort. She only could see the reason why “she was right”, combining that with the negative profile she had of brothers, we would bump heads no matter how we framed the conversation.  Anywho, now that there is some damage to my “disk drive”, rather than keep on adding applications to it, I would rather simplify things and use what I have available to me more judiciously, and find out how far I can get with what is available to me.  That this is notion came to me before my injury is coincidental, and is why I continued to codify my life.

How many times have you heard someone opine, if not asked of yourself, “Why..?” and you can fill in the ellipsis with whatever situation you can imagine, finding love or happiness, making more money, dealing with fail personal relationships, and the rest of the usual suspects.  As much as I was enjoying life in my late 20’s, I found that I was only approaching what could have been “happiness” for me.  This belief changed how I approached the questions in my mind, because if I thought that I had what I needed to be happy, then why was I feeling and doing the things that degraded my happiness?  Listening to young women who were trying to express complicate emotions through associating their feelings to crappy pop and R & B songs, I decided to likewise make the words that meant the most to me actually MEAN SOMETHING to me, and that led me to the Codified Life.

...THIS POINT MUST BE REACHED

(which is not to say that I am beyond “song idealization” myself!!)

I knew when I heard this song that it told the story of what I must do with my life.  Recalling the lyrics, “they think so small, they use small words…”, as a summary as to what was separating me from my surroundings and the thoughts that made “sense” to the people in my environment.  But here, I must pause, because whenever I hear someone talk about being “unique”, I want to say to them, “You keep using that word… I do not think that it means what you think it means.” Because in my understanding of the word, it is used poorly in everyday language, and as with the word “literally”, the constant misuse of these and other words will eventually lead to the evolution of “newspeak”.  And that ain’t good!

Anywho, I think that there is an arrogance in being so involved in your own interpretation of things that you cannot engender the slightest contradiction to your beliefs.  Stubbornness should not inhibit you from being able to assimilate new ideas that ask you to reassess your belief old thinking, and presses your beliefs to new limits. Stubbornness is most effective in subjective and localized areas... It is something that I have always used to assess others by, because it is a sign of the strength of their mind to hold ideas and weigh them without conflict or to the determent of their own way of thinking.

I see and hear what I want in a relationship so clearly in the “Friday Night Lights” speech, that were I to show it to a woman and she were to say that she “gets it” and she really does, she’d would become a candidate to “level up” along with me!!  But since that is unlikely to ever happen, I would have thought that with Nebraska knowing that there is something in the scene that is critical to my thinking, that she would have inquired what made it so important to me.

First of all, it isn’t about football in the least.  It is about relationship and love, faith and promises kept.  Stop looking at whatever obstacle that is currently facing you, but instead look at this moment as a chance to prove to someone, to show someone, EXACTLY what they mean to you.  You would think that it would be easy for that to happen in a relationship with just two people if it can be accomplished with a group of teenagers, but sometimes it is with two people where commitment and love breaks down the easiest.

BONA FIDES

I wonder how many times I have said that what I expect that I will give back, value added?  Referencing the word “unique” to show exclusivity for our problems is egotistic.  How do you believe that your situation is so incomparably special that it justifies your actions, no matter how harmful they may be to other relationships in your life?  But what really astonishes me is the sense of entitlement that people have when they fail to do anything different from what they were doing before, yet still expect to reach their goals in whatever spectrum of life that they feel cheated.

Now if you can, with clear eyes and love and joy in your heart, make the same commitment that Coach Gaines asked of his team to the person you claim to love and say that you gave all that you could toward making a relationship better, that you could not have done one more thing to make it more loving, functional, I would think that you had all the answers that you needed.  There are clear reasons in my mind as to why relationships tend to fail in my life, and codifying things was my attempt at being better at them.  But the main reason for my having “Rules To Live By”, is to set standards and to LIVE BY THEM, and create the expectations out of my desires into my reality. But what have you done Mark, where you feel you can have the expectations that you do of others?  Whenever I feel pressed to explain myself to someone, I tend to catch myself and wonder if they have been paying attention to me at all?  For me to let someone know of why I feel that I can readily expect certain what I ask of them, especially when they feel as though they know me..?  Well, it is an insult, and I have no patience, no love, for those who would need more or require more of me.  

NEXT ISSUE:  ARE WE STILL IN SCHOOL..?