On being alone

I am an introvert.  I like being alone.  It's not that I don't enjoy or need the presence or company of others, it's just that generally I prefer being alone.  There's a certain freedom that comes with being alone.  When there is no one else around, there are no immediate expectations, no one to judge you for being different, and no one to expect anything from you.  You don't have to smile and talk about things you're not interested in.  There is no external pressure.

This unrestrained feeling is one reason why I often like to have the blinds or curtains closed when I am at home.  I don't want people looking at me, wondering what I'm doing, or projecting their own expectations on me in the 10 seconds it takes to walk past the window.  This isolation makes me feel free from societal pressure.  Free to be me.  Free to spend my time how I want, to live my life how I want without the need to worry about what other people think.

Because I do care about what other people think.  It matters to me what kind of a person other people think I am.  It's not that I feel a need or desire to be cool, or popular, or to be best friends with everyone.  I just understand that when people see that I am like them, life becomes easier.  When they see something different in me, life becomes harder.  I don't like conflict.  I don't like who I become when I am in conflict with someone else.  I become belligerent, insensitive, logical to a fault.  I've been in too many arguments where I lose sight of the fact that I'm talking to someone I care about, and instead focus on the topic being disputed.  That's a personal fault of mine, and perhaps there's a better way to deal with it than just avoiding conflict.

I like being around other people.  Being able to interact with other people brings it's own sort of freedom as well.  Many opportunities open up when you can form friendships with other people. I enjoy the sense of community and activity that is felt at social gatherings, but I find it draining to interact in a large group of people.  I prefer to be able to focus on one person at a time, to have a meaningful, edifying conversation that I can learn from.  That's hard to do when there is a lot of people around.  One reason is that I have a hard time isolating the voice of one person from a room of conversations, which difficulty I blame on my ears.  Another reason is that in a social gathering, people move from group to group, and it's rare for groups to be smaller than three or four people.  When there are many people contributing, I don't often contribute, because I like to listen, and there's usually someone who manages to say something and change the topic of conversation before I come up with something I feel is worth saying.  Thus, after a while I just feel pressure.  Pressure to contribute when I don't feel like I can manage to say anything.

For a while, I dealt with this by finding a piano, and just playing music in the corner (at church gatherings).  This sometimes has started conversations with people who are curious about what piece I am playing, or who also play piano, or who are impressed with how I play.  But not always, and not with such regularity that I can use it effectively to accomplish what appears to be one of the main goals of social gatherings at my university.  To meet girls.

Which brings me to another difficulty of social interaction.  It has to do with the whole, "can you be just friends (emotionally) with a girl/member of the opposite sex?" question.  My problem is this: If I am friends with a girl, or especially best friends with a girl, I have probably though about dating her.  This is because the same qualities I want in a significant other are the qualities I also look for in a friend.  Now there are four general emotional situations that can exist between me and a girl.  Either I'm not interested in her romantically and she's not interested in me, or I am interested in her and she's not interested in me, or I'm not interested in her and she's interested in me, or I'm interested in her and she is also interested in me.  

In the first case, where neither one of us is interested in the other romantically, there would be little opportunity for us to develop a strong friendship.  I become closer to other people with one on one time.  If we're not interested in each other, when would we have that time?  I wouldn't ask her on dates, because that would send a message I wouldn't want to send.  The only time we would be together would be around other people.  This might let me get to know her (depending upon how vocal she is in the group) but I would remain in the shadows, that guy who doesn't really talk much.  So no close relationship really comes of that.

In the second and third cases, it just becomes awkward.  Unrequited love is not a game I ever want to play again.  No one wins.  One person wants a relationship, the other doesn't, so even if we did go on dates, the best scenario is that it never gets farther that a first or second date, for both people involved.  There might be room here for a friendship to develop, but it would involve a transition to the first case, where neither are interested in the other, something that is more easily said than done.

So we arrive at the fourth case.  This is the ideal, where both people are interested in the other.  This is where relationships can start.  Honestly I've come across this situation very rarely, and when it has presented itself to me, something else gets in the way (For you mormons out there, it's usually that someone is going on a mission) that causes a transition to case two or three.  One person, or both can't continue the relationship, for emotional or logistical reasons.  I feel that the strongest relationships would come out of this, but there's still a certain degree of awkwardness if the relationship translates from romantic to platonic.  You can't keep dating, because that takes up a lot of time, and sends the wrong message.  You can spend time with a group of friends, but then there comes my problem of not participating in a group.

I am probably oversimplifying and overthinking reality.  After considering the options, however, I feel like it's not as impossible to be just friends with a girl as I thought before I wrote the last five paragraphs.  It's still something I haven't really achieved in life.  

Anyway, I guess what I'm really trying to say is that life is complicated.  When I try to define my personality, I usually find something that I do that seems to be contrary to what I said earlier.  I can notice certain traits in myself, but I also see other balancing traits.  I like being alone.  I also like interacting with people.  I'm just better at being alone.

How cleaning your room will help fight entropy

I bet we've all heard this or something similar from our mothers, "Clean your room or you can't go out with your friends" or "Cleanliness is next to Godliness."  While the efforts of our mothers may have had varying degrees of effect upon all of us, the efforts of my mother didn't really strike a chord with me while I was still living at home.  Now, however, that I am living alone, I feel the need to exert some control over my life (and room).  So here I have imagined a real reason why my room should be clean.  It has to do with entropy. (Sorry to any erudite of thermodynamics that I may annoy with my poor description of said subject)

Entropy, as we all know, is a measure of the state of disorder or decay of a system.  All systems (including my room) tend to lose order and progress towards a state of entropy or disorder.  I feel that one of the greatest purposes of the human race is to be a force of order in the world, and not just let everything happen and continue to disorganize.

When we clean our rooms, we are exerting self control and our personal power upon our personal space.  I think that when we can begin to exert this control in one aspect of our lives, it will continue to other aspects as well.  When we control our personal space, we can control better our thoughts, our words, and our actions because once we do exercise control we can better apply the same principle and energy to other areas.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that we be control freaks.  We have to understand the purpose behind entropic states and be able to use entropy to our advantage (e.g. Chaos is really good for sparking ideas,) but we should not just let our room decay.

Some might say, "but when I don't clean my room I am exercising power, the power to go against what my parents say, because it's one of the few freedoms I've managed to wrest from my parents"  That's all very well and good, but when it comes time to leave the house you're not limited to that small area of control of your life, and not cleaning your room just becomes laziness, i.e. giving in to entropy.

So let us join the good fight against entropy by cleaning our rooms and helping others to do the same.

So to start off I want to start writing about the post apocalyptic genre.  It's a genre I enjoy, from videogame series like Fallout, Left 4 Dead, and Half Life to movies like I am Legend, World War Z, and Oblivion and let's not forget about books like The Hunger Games and the Shanarra series.  There just seems to be something intriguing about what would happen after all that we know ceases to exist.  Most of these titles seem to have a central theme of human ingenuity, and the ability to survive and persevere against all odds.

Of course, analyzing my recent media selections I question what it is about myself that gives rise to the desire to escape into a post apocalyptic world.  Not that it's just recent media selections that show I want to escape, that's been on my agenda since I started reading books in first grade.  This pondering was initiated by the movie I saw tonight, Oblivion.  When I watch movies or read books like that, I feel a yearning, a desire to take part in the action.  I want to participate.  Another thought I had was that Oblivion would make a great Videogame, or at least the world would.

Is my life so unbearable that I would rather live in a world where a giant computer/zombie apocalypse/ nuclear war has destroyed civilization as we know it?  Do I see civilization as broken, worth destroying?  Impossible to fix?  My life, as seen from an unbiased perspective would probably not seem so bad.  I'm a college student, my tuition, room and board is almost completely paid for,  I'm healthy, handsome (Okay I might be biased about that one, but that's what my Mom tells me), strong.  Of course I'm also an introvert, someone who likes being around people but fears participating in conversation.  I'm also fairly oblivious to a lot of things that other people seem to understand so easily.

I suppose that my real problem is that I feel like I haven't lived up to the standards that I have set for myself, standards which I feel are reasonable and not perfectionistic.  That, I believe is the real root of the problem. GENERALIZATION ALERT: When people don't live up to their personal standards, they feel like crap.  That's what's going on in my life.  I want to escape because I don't want to continue this "game".  I want to reload from a previous saved game.  I want to play a different game.  So I turn to escapism.

Anyway, that's that for today.