It's 12:40pm...I'm locked away in a hotel somewhere in Durham, NC and I've acquiesced into some sort of idle speculation about how I turned out the way I have and more importantly, why I haven't turned out the way I'm not. I guess that's a weird one for me.
You see, I'm as much a computer geek as I am a philosopher. I'm as much a cynic as I am an optimist. I believe that most people are selfish just as much as I believe one should give someone the benefit of doubt.
In my early years, my teens that I never entirely grew out of, I was fairly dark. I suppose I reveled in it in some ways. I unleashed my imagination upon paper through ample amounts of dark and sinister poetry and half completed prose. I used adjectives as if the very paper I wrote them on would die if there weren't enough. I questioned the religion of my parents and the sincerity of organized religion as a whole. I embraced all types of new thought, new age, new religions, soaking them up like a dry sponge in a dirty bath tub.
Through it all, many of the ideas I formulated in those years have stuck, while my positions on religion and thought have shifted toward acceptance though my beliefs are still very much personal to me. My ideas on the sincerity of organized religion hasn't shifted much, but organized religion is much like our current democracy. It's run by humans, and thus inherently flawed.
The thing is, I F E E L like writing and religion should be two very strong parts of who I am today. I need some expressive outlet and, as a human, some meaning to it all. But instead, my day to day life finds me waking up, going to work, coming home, enjoying some family time before everyone goes to bed, and then...at 1:00 AM in the morning...I'm still hovering from site to site, perusing the net or just passing time until I fall into a haze enough to drag myself into bed to repeat the cycle.
So where's this passion gone? Does anyone else out there have these desires that they just don't act on? Desires to write, Desires to study, Desires to Read? Is it my inherent procrastination gene that causes this behavior?
Take for instance my friend Jon, he just left for China for a two week trip just this week to study Loong Ying and Tai Chi with his Sifu's Master. We've sat up many nights discussing Tai Chi, it's affects upon health and it's effects in use. We've discussed his theories and my theories and while it's something I'd love to learn, he's actually out there doing it. Me? I'm probably refreshing Fark to see if anything new has been posted in the last hour since I checked it.
Sometimes I miss the old me.