I watch my critical mind. Sometimes it gets out of hand, and my mind goes on a lengthy critical discourse about someone until I hold out a mirror and force myself to apply the discourse to myself. I deny it, it's about this other person. They're the source of these thoughts. I observe them, I process my observations of their behavior.

But no, this mirror says, it applies to me, it is me. How can the source of my thoughts be outside of my own mind? "My" observations, also me. "Of them", what do I really know of them? Is this "them" fact? No, if they don't agree with my criticism, obviously it isn't them. I'm projecting, they're reflecting.

It is me, that is the benefit of generating positive thoughts, and the detriment of allowing negative thoughts. Either can become habit, neither is a permanent characteristic. Positive thoughts create a positive mind, not the other way around.

I don't have critical, negative thoughts because I naturally or circumstantially have a critical, negative mind. That's a tough one because I think my circumstances have created my critical, negative mind which leads to the critical, negative thoughts. But I don't think that's right, because I do believe that generating positive thoughts and habitualizing that process can create a positive mind or outlook.

I'm very attached to the negative aspects of my circumstances. I want to think they are the reason for my negative mind. In effect, blame them. They lead to negative, critical thinking, but really that is just an excuse to cultivate or habitualize a negative mind.

Alrighty then, I've enrolled in the TEFL course. Moving on with my future. What finally pushed me over the edge to enroll was my sister-in-law asking me how the course was going and not answering (um...er...good?) because I hadn't enrolled yet. The same thing happened two months ago.

But also in the same conversation, she mentioned that she had a distant relative in Taipei who has an English tutoring service and is looking for people! I call that a score. She says she'll get in touch with her and hook me up. That would land me right where I'm aiming and doing the only thing I'd be qualified for doing there. And an actual human contact.

As a reward for finally getting moving on this, I slept in my bed last night instead of on the floor. I think I like sleeping on the floor better. The bed was...I dunno, "too comfortable"? Not sure what I mean by that. Soft. Warm. Deeper sleep. What's not to like? Maybe I'll get used to it. I think I'll keep doing that for a while. Like the rest of you weirdos who sleep in beds. Pfft.

My target time for moving on is in mid-to-late January, after plane fares go down post-holiday. I hope I'm ready to move on by then, I'm sure not now. The idea of relocating again is a serious downer. Don't want to move. Entropy. Want to sink to the bottom. Belly up.

Haven't done one of these in a long while. Wow, look at that love rating! Unloving or unlovable? My life is 5.9? On a rotten tomato tomatometer, my life movie is rotten and gets tomatoes thrown at it (the good news is that it is only rotten by .1):

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	5.9
Mind:	7
Body:	7.3
Spirit:	7.5
Friends/Family:	2.3
Love:	0
Finance:	5
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

Your Life Analysis:

Life: Your life rating is a score of the sum total of your life, and accounts for how satisfied, successful, balanced, capable, valuable, and happy you are. The quiz attempts to put a number on the summation of all of these things, based on your answers. Your life score leaves room for improvement. You can make changes to improve your trouble areas, and this will bring you greater satisfaction. Focus on your weakest points and set about to change them. Do not delay your happiness and success.

Mind: Your mind rating is a score of your mind's clarity, ability, and health. Higher scores indicate an advancement in knowledge, clear and capable thinking, high mental health, and pure thought free of interference. Your mind score is not bad, but could be improved upon. Your mental health is not weak, but you are not achieving full mental clarity and function. Learn how to unclutter your mind. Keep learning, keep improving, continue moving forward.

Body: Your body rating measures your body's health, fitness, and general wellness. A healthy body contributes to a happy life, however many of us are lacking in this area. You have a rather good body score, which is an indication that you take care of yourself. There is room for improvement, however. Please keep doing what works. Eat right, exercise, reduce your stress, treat any illness. Doing these things will help ensure your body will be in good working order for a long time to come.

Spirit: Your spirit rating seeks to capture in a number that elusive quality which is found in your faith, your attitude, and your philosophy on life. A higher score indicates a greater sense of inner peace and balance. Your spirit score is relatively high, which means you are rewarded by your beliefs. Spirituality is clearly important to do. Never let it slip, and continue to learn and grow.

Friends/Family: Your friends and family rating measures your relationships with those around you, and is based on how large, healthy, and dependable your social network is. You scored at the very low end for friends and family. This means that your social network is weak and not functioning. Consider re-establishing old bonds as you work on forging new ones. You will be greatly rewarded in return.

Love: Your love rating is a measure of your current romantic situation. Sharing your heart with another person is one of life's most glorious, terrifying, rewarding experiences. Your love score is very low, indicating trouble. There is love out there for you. Seek the advice of wise people on how to go about finding it. Do not lose hope.

Finance: Your finance rating is a score that rates your current financial health and stability. Your finances are somewhat in the middle, neither bad or exceptional. Keep doing what works for you, and improve what doesn't. Focus on long-term financial stability as your goal.

current sounds (last 10 songs shuffled on iTunes):
1. With Every Breath I Take - Duet ("City of Angels")
2. Here Comes the Big Rush (Echobelly)
3. The Sinking Feeling (The The)
4. Dazed and Confused (live) (Led Zeppelin)
5. Very Ape (Nirvana)
6. Bring the Boys Back Home (live) (Pink Floyd)
7. Prophet 15 (Supergrass)
8. Innuendo (Queen)
9. Love and War (11/11/46) (Rilo Kiley)
10. Song of Complaint (Askarian & Khatchaturian)

There has only been one person who was even vaguely close to me who has died. She was my boss, but she was also a friend of a friend, and we went out for drinks after work almost regularly. She was an alcoholic, pretty fucked up, and emotionally abusive. She was also drop-dead gorgeous and brilliantly smart. We liked a lot of the same things in popular culture and she intimidated me.

She died in 2000 after an emotional meltdown triggered by her boyfriend breaking up with her. Her family said her kidneys and liver failed, but I know that she caused her kidneys and liver to fail. I wrote about my perspective of the events leading up to her death, and I was less than sympathetic. I was callous.

It's hard reading what I wrote. I was no friend. All I can do now is whisper "I'm sorry, Ritu," as I read. I read back, and I see signs that look like guidance, things that happened, that make me think I was supposed to be more active in helping her out.

Once I was avoiding her, but another friend had to call me. So I told the friend a signal so I would know it was her calling and not Ritu. Later in the day, I got the signal and picked up the phone. It was Ritu. I think that call ended in frustration and her hanging up on me, and then trying to call me back for the next 20 minutes.

That was a long time ago. I can't regret how I treated her. But I still think about it. But it's not about her anymore, she's moved on, it's only about me and what I've learned about my behaviors, my habit energies, and what I want to do to transform them.

Her death is still reaching me, and I wasn't even that close to her. Our deaths, any deaths may have far reaching effects. It doesn't matter if it was a suicide or not. If she chose to go is not a consideration at all, just that she's gone. That she's still affecting me means to me that she is a part of me. The reality of her is gone, whatever reality of her that is left is me, my reality.

That's why we live. Maybe my suicide will have far reaching effects that I'm not anticipating. I am expecting of anyone who knows me that they will not be affected by my suicide. My death, sure, fine, OK, whatever, but not my suicide. Hey, we all die. Don't single me out because I chose it. People never did live up to my expectations.

So I say, "I'm sorry, Ritu," but I'm saying that to myself. I'm not saying it to Ritu "out there" somewhere. I think back to what I did and think what I would do different, but that's not reality. How I treated her was me, my habit energies, my karma. And I will never treat anyone that way again.

Ugh, what the hell was that last entry? Maybe I was a little drunk. The truth of the matter is that there really is no one else in my life. Those people out there I was referring to don't matter, they don't mean anything. That is, they're not subject to be considered in my life or out of my life. It's moot.

Or rather, they have to be in my life first for me to be able to consider them out of it. What I wrote just seems silly in that light. :) Oh, but that makes my life all that more pathetic :(

That they're not subject to be considered in my life or out of my life is not a comment on their worth to me. Their worth is very high. Hm, the value of the people who I can't consider enough a part of my life to eject from my life is very high. I swear to god, there is not a contradiction in there somewhere.

I think I'm drunk.

I want to bring more attention to how pathetic I am by whining like a teenager how I have no friends. The realization just came matter-of-fact like out of the blue, so it doesn't have the self-pitying angst of a teenager, but I can try.

Actually, it was more of a realization how my primary "social interaction" is the internet. I don't know anyone here in New Jersey. I don't count family as "social interaction", anything that goes on between us qualifies more as "family dysfunction". Really, we can say "hello" to each other and it would be dysfunctional.

As for people I know who are elsewhere, it is getting so old and over. I used to purge people from my life every once in a while. That happened naturally. Things got old and over and I dispatched myself from their lives.

After a while, I started appreciating people in retrospect and re-considering my tactic. I started thinking that when you find "your people", your tribe, hold onto them as if your life depended upon it. It just might.

So I held onto some people, maybe I can consider them test subjects, and you know what? In the natural course of things, the dynamic with these people is still following the same old patterns, and we should have parted ways in natural order.

I examine the dynamic and my interactions with them, and it's become so substanceless and undependable. It's become frustrating and aggravating. Who are these people? What are they doing in my life? Bring the reality closer to the feeling I get from them.

I know it's me. No one else has these issues. I make my friends into my own image and that sets up the dynamic that eventually brings frustration and aggravation and the parting of ways.

It's uncanny, though. With one person I lost contact with earlier this year, our last conversation was basically her asking me why I couldn't be the person she wanted me to be. *blink, blink*. That wasn't uncanny. That was just nuts. Clean the slate, try to clear my mind. Whatever.

I didn't think there was anything specific behind my reluctance to enroll in the TEFL course. To get my life moving, that is. Indecision is nothing new to me. Procrastination is one of my hobbies.

But I started reflecting on teaching English in Taiwan, visualizing doing it and all the things I will need to do and experience to make it happen, and I realized that...I don't see it happening. Am I on drugs? Wow. How much would I hate doing that?

It sends my mind into overdrive.

It's only because of momentum, a chance push in the weightlessness of space, that I even consider it. I'd rather be pushed into a black hole.

And it frightens the bejeezus out of me, the idea of planning on doing something that looks like...living; doing something that doesn't have dying somewhere in the plan. Folks, this may be a first!

I have an un-opened bottle of expired Target sleeping pills that I'm gonna take one of these days. Not a suicide attempt, I've taken enough bottles of sleeping pills in my life to know that over-the-counter sleeping pills won't kill me. Just a suicide gesture that no one has to know about, something to push me down, way down, so that when I come back up there will be that momentum to move forward.

But it makes me think of the abuse I've wreaked on my body, especially my liver. Another bottle of sleeping pills isn't going to kill me, but my liver sure won't be happy about it. At worst, more damage done. More damage done in furtherance of some fatal internal failure. Which would be great, fine, if I was still living with a plan for dying.

I currently don't have one, gave it up not long ago, and I'm planning on going to Taiwan to teach English. Living. Not that I wouldn't be good at it. I'm afraid of losing sight that living is not what my life is about, and my investigation in this lifetime is on dying, and I always need to keep that in sight, or else what's the point of living?

At least the water's warm in Taiwan.

Oradell Avenue overpass from keauxgeigh on Vimeo.
Oradell Avenue overpass over the Garden State Parkway in Ridgewood, NJ.

Booth Avenue, Englewood, NJ

Probably the most important thing I discovered at the monastery was the intensely negative mind that I've cultivated and habitualized through my life, and that it doesn't have to be that way. It's an artifice, it's not just "what I am" or the way I think.

So probably the most important idea to practice that I took away from the monastery is to be mindful of my negative mind and cultivate positive thinking. It's tricky when it gets to me, because suicide is not necessarily negative for me, but that's not my point here.

It's also tricky in my interpretation because positive thinking that leads to a general feeling of well-being that then becomes an attachment is also not a goal, nor necessarily a good thing. Being positive and happy is fine, but being attached to it inevitably brings suffering since it inevitably ends. Neither is this my point here.

Being negative and critical is fine because it can be useful, but not being mindful of it runs the risk of cultivating it and it becoming habitualized to the point where it becomes an attachment. With positive, happy, well-being, the risk is becoming attached to it. With negative and critical mind, the risk is of it becoming attached to us.

This is important in my belief system because what is at the very core of our being, on the subtlest levels of mind, is what shapes our reality around us. And more importantly, at death when physical and material reality melts away, all that's left is that core being, that subtlest level of mind, and that's what guides us to our next life.

In the most general descriptive, if we are negative and have cultivated a negative mind, that's what we are attracted to in the between process, and we are born in circumstances that result from that. That's neither good nor bad, just karma. You can be born in negative circumstances, but that might also be the set up to overcome obstacles and end up positive. None of this is moral in human terms.

None of this was my point, though.

All I wanted to do was point at my last entry and acknowledge the negative mind that was manifested towards my parents and my cousin. So my parents don't know what my highest level of education was. Yes, I'm angry that they don't know me any better and make no effort to involve themselves in the simplest ways. Being negative about it and making snippy comments isn't going to change anything, so it's better to accept it and cultivate transformation in myself so that I'm not impacted negatively.

With my cousin, we've always had an intensely love-hate relationship where either we really love each other, or we're really disinterested in each other and want nothing to do with each other. I can suffer by allowing this "natural" dynamic to bat my feelings around, or I can cultivate patience and wisdom.

If she's deliberately ignoring me by not checking her gmail account, if I really need to contact her, I can send the same message to her main account. I don't know why she's avoiding and ignoring me, that's her business, and my feelings about it need to realize I'm not her. She does things and she has her reasons. I don't need to judge them, since I do things and I have my reasons that other people don't understand, and I don't like to be judged on them either.

None of this is getting rid of the negativity. It's just cultivating mindfulness of it, so if I ever get the mental tools to transform it, I can be aware of it.

Basically, I'm trying to kick start my life. I tend towards entropy. If my life is allowed to run out of momentum and stop moving, it will. I will let it. Without some external push, I'll just stop moving and sink to the bottom.

So I'm at my parents' house, sinking to the bottom. My parents are no help, they're totally hands off, no questions asked. When they ask questions and find the answers too difficult, they just drop them. But now even they are getting pushed to extremes, and they've recently dropped hints and given some aid to get me moving.

Ordinarily, my life is none of their business, and any help, aid, suggestions, feedback, encouragement, hints. . . talking. . . is not welcome, but even I'm realizing how pathetic this is getting, and I allowed it. Some movement has been made to reinstate my Taiwanese passport, so that if I go there, I won't have to worry about my visa constantly expiring.

They filled out the passport application because it's all in Chinese. They don't even know what my highest degree of education is. I don't have a doctorate.

The next step is what I've been saying I'll do for the past three months – take an online course to get certification to teach English as a foreign language. This is all me, I need to do it, no outside encouragement, no one else involved. All I have to do is click the mouse a few times, but, man, entropy.

The momentum that I'm trying to pick up is for going to Taiwan and teaching English. Although it recently occurred to me to find out if there are bike messengers in Taipei. If so, that's what I want to do. Imagine that, at my age.

My cousin in Kaohsiung has gone radio silent. There have been long stretches that I haven't been able to write to her because of lack of inspiration, but my last message to her was asking if she knew anything about housing in Taipei. Pretty straight forward. No response. I don't think she's checking my messages, she has a dedicated gmail account just for my communications.

And leading up to this, she stopped responding to my messages. Her last few messages were all one-sided and made no mention of anything I wrote. In fact, she mostly wrote about Buddhism, but her tone was a little like her last foray into Buddhism, when she joined what turned out to be the Buddhist equivalent of a cult. Brainwashed and too easily impressed by "magical" aspects of Buddhism and attributing reality to them.

The magical aspects of Buddhism, fine, I have nothing to say about that. There's a wide range of Buddhists including ardent Zen skeptics to total crackpots, and I, myself, am at neither extreme. However, I don't think anyone should ever be impressed by any "magical" aspect of Buddhism, and any reality attributed to it must keep in mind that all reality is subjective.

I sent her something for her birthday, and her response to that was, "Thanks for the gift", then launching into the one-sided Buddhist thing.

I'm trying not to be upset at her until I know more, but when things aren't going well between us, when communication falls apart, we tend to repel each other, tethered together only by the nominal tie of blood which will still eventually bring us together again.

Getting this journal back on track.

To make it say what I want it to say.

This is a journal. A record. Not a fucking blog. I don't care who reads this, I don't care how pathetic or petty I sound, I don't care who I offend or alienate, I don't care who I bore...

Even forcing this is being self-conscious, but it's a necessary step for it get less self-conscious.

Fuck, my blog is in therapy.

Stagnant weblog. It's not going anywhere, though. I like it too much. Even with the anti-social url that begs to be misunderstood, and says too much for me to disclose cavalierly to acquaintances. Or not.

I was going through old journals from before blog, and I kinda want to be more like that again. Unself-conscious, raw, writing things that really mean something to me. But then again, that was then, and things need to move on. This is blog.

I do want to be less self-conscious, though. I've been feeling like I've been pigeon-holing myself, thinking of only writing things that are "in the tone" of this blog. Fuck that. That's so dumb.

I can write about being glad Corzine won the New Jersey governor election because Forrester just seemed kinda scary, but wasn't Corzine part of the previous administration that was wracked and riddled by corruption and scandal?

I can write about watching the entire only season of Firefly that my brother got on DVD, and it sucks donkey balls that the show got cancelled because Joss Whedon is brilliant and intelligent and the executives at Fox have donkey balls for brains.

I can write about watching "South Park" twice a day, six days a week. That show offends every moral fiber in the liberal arts weave of my education, but shit is funny!

I can write about still sleeping on the floor.

I can write about my daily 20-mile bike rides.

I can write about the grand unification theory in Buddhism.

Shit but my life is so boring. Don't matter, as long as I'm not being self-conscious. Raw it down.

What am I doing with this blog again? I guess it's a continuation of said past journals. OK, so why those past journals (and why are they going online as well?)? Record. Not for anyone now. For me, too, but not for me. For me, present ego, but not for me that is not a me.

Oh right, I write for a family descendent 200 years from now. That's the ideal, that's the guideline. Who knows if that descendent will exist, who knows if the internet will exist? It's a present ideal. Convey who I was, how I lived. That's kinda dumb, too.

I don't even care anymore why I'm gonna commit suicide eventually one of these days. I don't even care that I'm leaving my entire past personal history to explain it, because I don't care about who would receive such an explanation. My suicide and my reasons just really don't matter anymore. Everyone else doesn't matter anymore! BUT. At some point it all did. And I wrote it down then. Huzzah.

I write this with no foreseeable expectation or intention of doing it, but I'm sure it will come up again. I don't think there is any avoiding it. I need to do it, whether I like it or not.

Fuck, why am I writing about suicide again?

I think school districts that want to teach "'Intelligent' Design" along with science should be allowed to. I believe science shouldn't be dogmatic, and fighting bone-headed, not-quite-alternative theories just makes sciences look bad. I'm actually really curious about how children who are taught "'Intelligent' Design" turn out. Could be a scientific study. More important, could be hilarious.

Clean the slate, try to clear my mind.

In real life, my pattern has been to purge people out of my life. Why not here? I think it's time to clear my links, delete them and see who remains. I'm sure there are people who have linked me only to find that this blog is not what they linked it for. This will be the opportunity for them to get me off their blog rolls.