..five

• Spiritualizing politics and political figures. Obama is Hope. Obama is Freedom. Obama is Change. For a while now this has bothered me and the advertising is becoming slightly overwhelming with the elections just a few days away. Obama is just a human. Humans can not be Hope, Freedom, or Change. I understand the spiritual nature of the campaign and I think that it is remarkable to watch the response of my generation, and so many others, to the charisma and charm of a new face on the scene. I will be voting for Obama but sincerely doubt that all of his lofty and amorphous claims will ever flesh themselves out and I am okay with that. He is a politician and he works in the world of politics, which is highly important and limited in its scope of influence. Obama is not going to bring a revolution of daisies and puppy dogs but sometimes, when I get a little lost in the rhetoric, I wonder.
• Am I normal? Recently I have been wondering if I am normal. Not in the way of comparison, where I am insecure if I somehow find out that I am abnormal. I have been thinking about it in the way of wondering if I have an ordinary human experience in my life. Do other people think about the same things I do? Do people notice the things that I do in social situations? Do other people get as angry as I do at a lot of things? Do other people feel as removed from most situations as I do?
  
• Being sexually active. This is funny to me. For a while it has felt misplaced on my tongue and I think it's because it is always attached to the actual act of sex. You have sex? That means you are sexually active. You don't have sex? That means you are sexually inactive. Right? The logic would assume so but I think that this places people in rough territory while they are single, dating, and engaged because it places a lot of their understanding of personal sexuality in a dualistic framework of sex/no sex. I would like to think that everyone is sexually active because everyone is sexual. For me it is important to think of myself as being sexually active because it is a part of who I am. To wait for a moment in time to become active in a part of my personhood seems strange to me. This thinking has nothing to do with sex, but it has everything to do with how I understand what it means to be me.
• Material solutions to metaphysical problems. It is sobering to me to think of how many times I try to create/employ material solutions to my metaphysical problems. Feeling angsty about something, maybe I need to get rid of all of my stuff. Feeling trapped in my life, maybe I need to buy myself that latte, watch that movie, see that friend, leave this town. Lately I have been feeling like my life has been characterized by coping, learning how to live with an illness that will never leave me. The band-aids of materialism feel empty after a while and they have a shitty track record; 0 for 3,000,000. Brokenness (courtesy of Bob Z) is a constant (but I do not think necessary) part of my humanity and learning what it means to live authentically inside of these conditions is my current preoccupation.
• Confession. I don't really like senior year. I could complain about everything I don't like about it but it is a waste of my energy and your brain capacity so I will refrain. So far, it just hasn't been a whole lot of fun.