The Calm Before the Storm

Finally had a good amount of free time and I came around to thinking about my blog. I never really got into it but now I actually have things to share, stories to tell. I might be writing this for my own kind of catharsis, but I hope that some of you might at least find it an interesting read.

To give you a taste of what's to come, here's what to expect:

• Currently I am 18 and a senior in private, Christian high school, about to graduate
• I've been struggling with homosexuality for the past five years
• Expect (appropriate and tasteful) stories about my experiences with that and how I've handled it and grown from it throughout high school
• I will be posting about Christianity in the modern society in America
• I might be posting about other experiences that I've had with my friends and their morality
• I'm trying to avoid cookie-cutter stories

Lately I've felt this desire to record my thoughts and events, but that's more of a personal matter and has its own historical reasons. I have the urge to discuss, to share my ideas with others and to contribute to others' ideas as well. It's something I've come to learn from many times in the past, especially when talking to people that are smarter/wiser than I.

P.S. Reading older stories of mine makes me glad I never really got in to writing about them haha.

Why I haven't been posting, and more!

     So if any you have ready any of my blogs, you would notice that I haven't posted in a while! Now, it seems odd to start a blog, get a few posts going, and even get a few followers only to drop the effort completely, right? Right. Point being, I've been extremely busy lately and this blog hasn't necessarily been the number one priority in my life at the moment. After I finish this blog I'm actually going to draw! (another commodity I barely have time for)
If you're wondering why I have been so busy, please, take a gander at the little title above this entity we call a paragraph....

     That's right, school is why I've been busy.  School has its pros and cons... homework being the main con, but I like learning (I'm kind of a nerd) so that's definitely a pro for education. In the previous years of my student life I've always been confident that I'm going to take the hardest, most rigorous courses available and that I would just decide what I wanted to major in college when the time came. However, it's my junior year at the moment and my classes have really upped the anti on their complexity and workload. It's just made me think, is it really worth going through all the trouble and stress (another big con) just so I can achieve the approval of my parents? Also, my friendships have grown much, much stronger as well as my faith, but I'll talk about that later. I'm just considering my priorities in life... my parents want me to be rich, but if I'm not happy does that matter? My mom doesn't seem to care about what I want and just wants me to get money whereas my dad says he wants me to be happy but that the only way I will achieve that is by having sex and money. As for what I think, I don't really care about money THAT much, just as long as I can support myself and maybe a family in the future, as long as I'm happy, enjoying my work.

Ugh... there's so much I want to talk about, but so little time!

      Anyways, moving along to friends. I've always been curious as to how I could approach my friends in order to bond in a way, to get to know each other on a personal level. First off, people always tend to shy away from touchy topics such as politics, sexuality, and religion. My thought process was this, if they shy away from the topic because they're afraid of what others might think, wouldn't a good friend support them no matter what they think? Or even if not to support, to guide into the idealistic direction? (I don't use the word "correct" because that's fairly relative to the individual's worldview) As I started approaching, or attempted to approach, these barricades people set up within their friendships I noticed two reactions. One: They opened up and you have some sort of bonding moment after which you come out trusting each other more with a better friendship than you had before. Or two: the friend you're speaking to doesn't really hold the subject as being serious and moves on to something else either due to disinterest or has some sort of fear/embarrassment of talking about it. Not saying that there's not potential of you becoming closer to said friend, but those are just the reactions I've observed. Moving on, having the support of friends that actually accept me for who I am make me happy! Big surprise there right? I've always been kind of a lone-wolf, but this new-found support gives me a whole other idea of things to do with my life. However yet again, I have not the time to expand upon that point in this post.

     Religion will have to be in another post, I've already spent a rather large amount of time writing this... I promise you, it's going to be interesting! Sorry for the extremely long post. It's pretty much a summarized update of what's been going on in the past month.

Rules, rules, and rules for rules. Oh yes, did I mention rules?

     I've gone to this private Christian school for quite a while (6 years now) and this blog that I happened to stumble upon has brought something to my attention. Throughout my career as a student I've been expected to behave a certain way because I'm supposed to have prestige for attending a high-end school. Although I understand that this isn't outrageous request, it has turned out to affect who I am as a person.

     Since I've been raised by "follow the rules and you'll be good" I've come to depend on the rules as the safe road to success in both worldly and religious aspects. As I've grown and matured over the years the more I've realized that to live my life by these rules and to depend upon them isn't really going to help me develop. I have become accustomed to taking the safe route by following rules as close as I can and because of that I think/have thought that following them is the only good path to take. That people who didn't apply these rules to their very core were wrong. Point being, since I had taken this principle to heart I always figured that if I followed Christianity's rules that I would in a way "win" God's love.

     At one point I sort of gave up, I didn't and still don't feel as if I have acquired (or found) His love. That blog I mentioned talked about how this girl had a similar problem. She stuck to the rules and now she wants to go out and experience His everlasting love for herself, not through the rules. To be honest, I've kind of been inspired by this. That blog kind of flipped a switch in my brain that I hadn't known was there before. As if it shed light on something I hadn't ever thought about.

     "It's no wonder that my friend struggles with the idea that she needs to "clean her life up" in order to come to God. She loves God with all of her heart. But she's been told for years--explicitly or implicitly--that love is earned when you follow the rules. And part of her wonders whether that's true with Him as well."

     This part of that blog is what touched me the most... It relates to me almost on a parallel level, which is why I think I connected with it so much. So thank you to Matt Rose for posting that on your blog. I feel as I might have the solution to why I've been having trouble with my spiritual relationship between the Lord and myself. For whoever is reading this, what have your spiritual problems been in the past? Did you ever find a solution? Can you relate to situations such as mine? I'm interested in what you might respond.

Credit to Matt for that post on his blog.

The Practice of Optimism

     So for school I have to type a paper over Helen Keller's essay, The Practice of Optimism and it actually brought to my attention some interesting comments on the people that inhabit out world. Now, obviously, due to the title, Helen is going to side with optimism over pessimism, however I don't necessarily agree with her.

     She constantly seems to exaggerate in her comparisons between the two trains of thought ending with optimism improving the world and pessimism "retarding" it. To me this doesn't seem either reasonable or logical. For her opinion to actually work peoples' minds would have to be one hundred percent of either or, which by the way isn't possible. Helen constantly reiterates the same points over and over throughout her essay and just rephrases it with different people. She does have some good points, I just don't think it should be taken as fact, and far from it. The paper is obviously he opinion, but she does have some good points.

     I personally believe that everyone has a combination of both pessimistic and optimistic qualities. As for myself, I'm more of a pessimist, but only with thoughts concerning myself. What about you all? Are you a pessimist? Optimist? What's your opinion between the two?

Am I just another blog?

     So I've looked around the website for a little bit, going from blog to blog, and it made me realize this, "I'm just another blog no one cares about..."
Now, for those of you that are reading this later, when I'm writing this I have absolutely no followers. Weird, huh? Why in the world would I be typing this if I have no followers? Well I'll tell you, rhetorical question that I'm going to answer myself. I'm making this to get my thoughts out, to myself, so that I can process the info better and also in the hopes you'll find some sort of enjoyment out of this. Whether it be from humor of my weird post or because you actually like reading about my thoughts... However it's most likely the first option...

     Back to the point. Being a new blogger you're not going to stick out, but this kind of made me think about me as a person. Am I "just" another person out of billions? Do I really mean anything? Am I of any value? My answer to myself is yes, even though it might not be or seem like much, I matter somewhere to something or someone. It's because of that reason that I will start and continue this blog, it would be nice to have SOME followers though. :)