It's all coming together.

Slowly, but I'm starting to understand.

Or maybe, learn not to need to.

After being sick (though, I still am sick) I lost four pounds. Ended up revising my diet, too. I'm cutting fast foods and anything with a lot of either salt or sugar out. There's way too many things in life to enjoy to let food take priority over them. Especially at the expense of my own health.

It's late ... and I've got a day off tomorrow. I expect to be keeping myself surprisingly busy, though. Lots to do, and not all that much time for it. My overtime hours are over, which means I now get to sleep in for thirty minutes.

But hey, that's 30 minutes more than I would have gotten. After consideration, I've decided to look into knitting again. You never know. I could make an awesome woven hat, or something. We'll see.

Been a while since I've updated.

I've been sick -- really sick. My mom had me stay with her for a few days to recover; I was worried about exposing my grandmother and giving her what I had.

Which was diagnosed as some viral thing. Whee virii.

I've got all sorts of medications, including an inhaler for when I have trouble breathing. "When you can't breathe, just take a deep breath of this." (How does that work?)

And some nasty nasal spray stuff, and some pills that make you dizzy. Bleah.

Anyway, on Friday I GMed a bit, but I think I did a really horrible job, because I was very severely out of it.

I got home at about 2:00 AM. Went to sleep. Woke up at 8:30. Puttered around a bit, took some medicine, and then went back to sleep. Woke up at 7:00 or so, and saw that the house was on fire.

Yeah.

The house was on fire.

Well, apartment, really. I was having trouble breathing -- didn't know what was going on. So I took a shower, hoping the hot water would clear my lungs up, and remembering that the doctor said the inhaler was kind of potent, and should be used only as a last resort.

After cleaning up, I got out, and smelled smoke. So I dressed as quickly as I could, opened the door (thought about testing the knob to see if it was hot, but didn't actually do it), and saw that the upper half of the room was flooded with smoke.

Now, my grandmother has an incredible penchant for burning food. Does it all the time, in fact.

So I looked at her, to see if she was okay, had passed out, was injured, etc.

She was watching the television, about fifteen feet to my right. About five feet to my left, a pot (a metal pot. A METAL POT) was on fire.

I grabbed it and flung it into the sink, immediately turning the water on, and then ran to the back door to open it and provide ventillation. Then I set up the fans to clear the air up, and set up the fan I use in my room (to keep smoke from my room out of the rest of the house). There was a brief interval where I repaired my grandmother's fan, and she asked me what was going on. I stood up straight, even though this meant my head was surrounded by smoke, and said, "Grandma, there was a fire."

She looked at me incredulously, and then looked around at all the smoke in the room, apparently just then noticing that she had left something on the stove.

I checked the contents of the pot once it was out (and it was ruined, but I wanted to know what it was -- maybe I could figure out how long she'd just forgotten it on the stove). She had been boiling some beans for soup. But the pot, which is about eight inches across, was filled about two inchest deep with water, and a quarter inch with beans.

It'd been on the stove long enough for every bit of water to be evaporated and the beans to catch on fire. Apparently the smoke that spilled around the edge of the pot lid bore some atomic bean-components which then stuck onto the lid and caught on fire, which is how the pot itself burned.

I'm guessing she'd just forgotten about it for an hour. Not fallen asleep. Forgotten about it.

I'm way too sick to deal with this kind of stuff, and it's depressing. But it kind of shows that my suggestion that my grandmother move into some kind of assisted living situations is not entirely unfounded.

So now I'm sick and depressed.

You know. I never thought I'd get to the day where cutting out after only 8 hours of work because I was sick to my stomach and nearly passed out. And I really never thought I'd feel like I was such a slacker for it.

Where'd this work ethic thing come from?

I talk too much. Way, way too much, and I finally figured out why.

I spend the entire day talking on the phone, but while I'm speaking, I feel like I'm not expressing myself. I'm not really speaking for me, I'm doing it for other people.

So when I have a chance to talk with friends, I don't shut up and listen, I just keep going on and blathering in a mad rush to scream, "I'm a real person beyond that tech support guy!"

That was anti-clamactic.

Alrighty.

So lately I've been struggling with moral issues and such. I'm on this trip where I've learned that I know nothing. Admitting that is frightening, because the world is a big place, and knowing that you don't know more than a fraction of what's going on in it is (really) somewhat daunting.

I mean, there could be unspeakable horrors lurking around the corner. WHO KNOWS?

This seems over-blown, but it breaks down like this:

There's a massive load of philisophical issues I've been trying to juggle in my head. I am, at heart, a lazy person who just wants to be happy. But I'm also greedy, so once I get what I want, I want more.

Aside from the duplicity, the attention whoring (hi!), and everything else in my life....

What it all amounts to is my belief that I am a bad person. This is realized from my actions, which hurt people. Hurting other people for your own gain is (in my opinion) bad.

Now, it's been some time since I've intentionally manipulated people, caused people to have bad experiences, and generally made trouble for people.

So I don't ACT bad.

But does this make me good?

My initial philosophy was that if I acted good, I would be good. But really, that's shallow, and simple, and stupid, and it's just not that easy.

So I took up taoism and studied, and learned, and questioned, and realized ... nope, I was right the first time. It really is that easy.

Except it isn't.

Knowing what to do and doing it are very different.

But I am digressing. This is about why I am a bad person.

I tracked it down. At the core, I want to be happy. Which is, I think, what we all want. Whatever it takes to make us really happy, it what we want. Usually the things we want to make us happy are just that. Things.

Now, Zen says that this desire is what denies us the ability to achieve our goals. Our desires distract us from the fact that all we need to be happy is to want to be happy.

Of course, we can't all sit in the Lotus position all day long and contemplate our navels.

Tao (pretty much) says, "Don't worry about it. Do what you do, and just enjoy life in a way that allows others to do the same."

And this I like a bit better, but I see that there is still some truth in the philosophy of Zen.

The long and short of it is to make ourselves happy not by simply saying, "I'm happy," without having anything, because that's hard. The trick is to learn to be happy.

I struggled for months of being crushed under an inability to withstand my job. I hated it. And I wished, and wished, and wished, that I could just be a person with enough of a work ethic to find the job itself rewarding.

And now that I'm actually working hard enough to feel tired from it ... really bone tired ... I'm finding I like it. I have actually made myself able to be happy with what I have.

Of course, it doesn't stop here. This is only a stop on the path. The way is to capture that happiness, and learn to take it with me. And then ... then I will truly be alive.

I feel content.

And I like it.

I'm fucking beat.

I had a massive diatribe prepared. Assume I delivered it and it rocked your world.

Actual content to come at some point in the future. x_x