Birthday blog: More on the individual soul(12/2/12

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me. I am an adult. I'm turning twenty. I don't give a crap.
Hint: It would make a lot more sense if you sang it in the "birthday song tune"

Joking aside, today's blog will be more on the very theme of the very essay that opened the door to my philosophy. The individual spirit. This time, I'll attempt to make points on self-reliance, the theme and very essay that started everything for me.

Mr. Emerson's essay Self-Reliance, even as an excerpt was the catalyst that I needed to wake up from my slumber of talents and be able to find a means of exploiting them. Self-Reliance is the ability to depend on one's own self and to become independent in every sense of the word, at least to me. Ever since I've given up sexuality, I've deeply embraced the idea of being by myself and being truly independent. Being independent in my opinion is also the humorous inability to take crap from anybody, even if you're working for a company and you got a grouchy boss, you can't take crap from that person when you have the spirit of independence burning inside you.

Even though I say a lot about independence, I feel myself that I do not believe I can be independent from my mother just yet. I feel like I have a ways to go, even though today is my birthday and I'm turning twenty by the end of the night. That';s just me though, I believe that I'll be able to one day go out into the world and give it heck with all i got. I'll get myself a nice house and a nice life until I meet my grave in the distant future. I may never have children of my own or a legacy, but at least I'll have enjoyed life a successful-in-mind-and-spirit man.

I want you readers to keep on keeping on and keep doing what you are doing to become independent individuals. Never stoop so low as tyo put on a facade that isn't who you are. be yourself and no one else, only you can be you and others may make fun of you, but they're just jealous that you're yourself. Never give into pressure and keep being yourself, readers, that's the best advice I can give to anyone, even if they've heard thousands of times before me.

Never be anyone else but yourself,

Yours Truly

I took control of my dream

This blog post is being written just after I woke up from a most unusal dream, in which, i took control of it. Specifically, it's length.

It started with a weird game show host-looking guy telling an audience that if they do something, i actually forgot what it was, that they would a jetski and matching boat, runneruups would win twenty-five thousand dollars. I guess I undertook that contest as I then went to a random wrestling match where one of the wrestlers kept having flashbacks while he did his own thing. I was somehow able to see these flashbacks that were all flashbacks of his entire wrestling career apparently.

Shortly after that, I was on a street, it was dark and it looked really late at night. I'm guessing I was with a police officer because I was getting out of a polie cruiser with this police officer woman when an old time horse carriager drew past us. the carriage itself was all black and it was being pulled by a couple of all brown horses. There indeed was a rider, and I heard in my head the game show host from before saying that if I stole any one of the two vehicles near me, which I'm assuming he meant the buggy because there would be no way even in my dreams, I would steal a police car for fifty thousand dollars. not even for a hundred million either. So I just ran off straight ahead of me, leaving the scenery behind and suddenly I was in my home, apparently chasing one of my cats named Gizmo around for some odd reason.

I remember I felt myself smiling in my dream and I pushed back the drying machine and found a large pile of what appeared to be bright gray whatever, I'm assuming it's litter or something, I have no idea and I called to Gizmo and Gizmo jumped ight out of the pile and ran away so i gave him chase and then I saw running to my left was a police officer, what was a police officer doing phasing through my whole kitchen and why was I so distracted by this person? Then I was in a dark parking lot, it was leading out of some kind of place, I'm assuming it was a strip club because I had strip club in my mind for where I was right at that moment.

I was with two other men. A really tal musclebound dude and another guy around my height. We were apparently leaving the club or whatever place and getting ready to go to a very nice party, parked all alone in the parking lot that looked indoors, but was really surrounded by a whole building, I'd say, because I ran around it late, was a most unusual car. What was unusal about it was that it was a rainbow colored car. It was some type of sports car, but I'm not sure of what it was. Inside however were three fancy suits for the three of us and so we decided to put them on, when I heard a female's voice say "Stop! Don't get in that car!" And one of the guys told me to run and so I ran, almost right into the source of the voice as it seemed to get closer and teeling me to stop and so I quickly turned around and ran straight into the building, I appeared in a hallway that was filled with other people that dressed nice and everything, but despite having the idea that at that exact moment, I was running through a strip club, I thankfully didn't see any nude women or men anywhere and then I ran into a couple of lady nurses moving a patient on a table around. What was this doing in a strip club? I'd say this somehow led into my next segment.

I tried to quickly get around the two and I said "excuse me, I need to get through, I'm in a hurry" ad got around them, but I just find myself seated in a room, I was apparently seated on an exam table, I couldn't tell where I was, but the female voice I heard in the parking lot was connected to a redheaded woman that was now standing in front of me with my mother to her left in front of me as well. She told me my entire dream lasted perhaps two minutes. Okay. what they hay here lady, you're not supposed to track the length of my dream. and then I nodded and said with slowly slurred speech "yes, I'd say two minutes as well" and this is where I tok control of my dream. I felt as if I would wake up there at that moment, but I actually stayed within the confines of my dream, even as I started to feel my own body in the real world under my blanket, she was then asking me questions about previous dreams that I was consciously aware of and felt myself actually thinking back to those dreams as I answered them. I told her about my suspesce thriller series of dreams and then the top half of my vision suddenly tinted in a blue square and I tried to look down to ignore it, but then the whole dream clouded up and I slowly opened my own eyes.

One the consciousness of all animals

Today's post will be about universal consciousness. Which has actually been something I thought about since my philosophy class had a couple of lectures on computers and consciousness. Really invoked when someone said that animals are purely instinctive and nothing else and I came up with ideas to challenge that idea. What those ideas are, are seen here.

This post stemmed from the idea stated above, given that animals other than humans are purely instinctive creatures that lack any kind of free will. Sure, this may seem evident in animals that go on migrations to mate every year, but I am sure there at least some speck of some kind of freedom in these creatures.

You can watch a pet, a cat, pr dog and view how they go about things. Sure, they will want to do what they were originally bred for, but that does not mean that dogs will always be instinctively happy to see their owners or that cats will always instinctively want to claw up your furniture. As a budding philosopher. O have the belief that all animals have some kind of free will about them, even though it may not seem evident in them some of the time they are being studied. Going back on pets, when they are injured in some way, they will yell out in pain, just like a human would. Does this mean that it is instinctive? Perhaps. I know I would yell really loudly if I were a cat and had my tail stepped on.

However, it seems to me that animals are beginning to show that they do indeed have some kind of free will. like chimps or octopi. it has been documented that chimps now seek caves to hide in from the glaring sun, first signs of higher intelligence? Many scientists believe so, but I believe that this is some kind of sign of a free will. The only more thought-provoking one is the fact that chimps have been documented to use sticks as spears to hunt other animals in order to consume them. This should be a sign of free will, since it is not that they would instinctively want to hunt down other animals simply to devour their tasty flesh, they could always live on fruits and other things. I still believe this is free will here.

Also octopi. It has also been documented that octopi are beginning to learn the use of tools in the wild. There has been evidence shown that a wild octopus was seen carrying two coconut halves and racing back to its home in order to use the coconut halves in some way, probably for the instinctive use of taking cover from predators. Now the octopus that was seen doing this might not have even wanted to use this coconut. but it apparently developed some kind of thought that made it see that it was a good idea to try and use these things that were dropped to the bottom of the ocean floor somehow in some way. This is clearly free will to me. Maybe not to the rest of you, but I'd like to think so.

Short, sweet, to the point, just like how I like to make my arguments on things. This is quite simply my view on animals, but as the idea behind my blog title goes, I've written these ideas purely to share with others and how you, the reader perceives these views, is up to you.

 Let's see what I'll write about next,

Yours Truly

Life, expressions, journeys, roads, and the making of an individual

People always say their own things and have their own opinions about life. How it is dealt with, how it is perceived, and all of these other things that go into people's opinions. What most people seem to think from my observations is how life is essentially lived.
    What most people like to think of life as is some sort of journey or anything of those sorts such as the aforementioned journey. Others like to think of it as a sort of road, others like to think of it as an experience of sorts as well. I have also heard once of life being a dash. But a sprints, dashes, runs, journeys, roads, mountains, and hills aside, the real thing that life can be in my opinion is what one makes of their life. Life is not the journey or the destination, life is how one chooses to live. People will always have their opinions and their will always be people that agree with what you have to say and their will be people opposite that. How you choose to take these kinds of people and situations is rightfully how you choose to live.
    I'm not saying that what I'm writing here today is what life should be portrayed as and I most certainly can not say that I have found the meaning of life, because that is something that is actually a thing that one must answer themselves. Life doesn't really have a legitimate solid meaning. How one chooses to perceive their life is their answer to that question and there is simply no right or wrong answer. What you make of yourself today will be the you that you have chosen for tomorrow. Life will never be easy, there will always be the hard things and also the easy things as well. Life will have its fond memories and moments as well as its dark. This is why one must do what they can each day to make themselves feel at home in their world and to make others feel just as bright. You can live life with a smile on your face everyday until your face is frozen in that state, but it is really what you do to make yourself noticed in this wide world and what you do to express who you are among countless other people that really makes who you are. You can even live life in the facade of something that is completely not what you truly feel that you are.
     I can personally sit here all day and say how I have missed countless moments in life to make friends and be recognized and have warm and pleasant memories, many more than I have now at this moment in time, but the real point here is that I want you, the readers to feel that you are special. Even if you are down on your luck and feel that the very earth is against you in every way and even if others are making you feel sad, you just have to note that you have made yourself off to be a much person than at least I have shown to others. You had that certain ability to express who you truly are. You have made many friends while I only made so few of them and got to just learn the names of many others. You have had more fond memories than I have at least made for myself.
     Just don't think for a moment that I am an unhappy person, because I am at the very least at peace with myself. I know who I am, and I have only just learned how to express myself. I am just one person in a world of billions of human beings choking out other animals on a planet that has become far too crowded for humans.
   To end this all off, you make yourself the person that you are. Those close to you can only lay down the mold of you. Life is not a journey or a road or anything. Life is how you make yourself out to be. We must all try to live our lives as best as we can, because the time we have created as humans, waits for no one.

Live your life, not some one else's,

Yours Truly

My Future

To get something down after a long time of just simply not posting anything, I decided to dedicate this day's post to what I have in mind for my near future. Everyone who knows me at least past my name knows that I wish to go into college to major in philosophy. I did some thinking before about that and thought that it wasn't exactly good for me. I always thought of college as a form of schooling in which you can really take hold of your dreams and goals. I always thought of college as that big step toward the future you so desperately desire. However, from my harsher, more negative, modern point of view, college is really only there to give you a hand in getting a job since most good jobs require college degrees. Thus, I can chase my dreams in college all I want, but I'll only end up feeling sorry for myself once I have that degree in my hand and no job at all. I thought that I should choose majoring in something that is guaranteed to give me a job. However, I thought about that, and  came to the conclusion that majoring in something I very clearly wouldn't like just to earn a solid paycheck isn't going to fulfill my life once I have a steady job. The other problem with that is that I would more than likely flunk out of it anyway since everyone who knows me knows I'm terrible at math and science and math and science is what unfortunately earns most of the paychecks. After all that has been said, I'm just going to say that I am now back to square one, but this time with plenty of plans, how and whether or not to execute them is going to be the challenge from here.

Until then,

Yours Truly

The reason behind Brilliance

I wanted to write about the purpose and the whole meaning behind the essay Brilliance. It was originally written as a way to pep myself up during a time when I didn't feel like I was worth much as a philosopher and so I just spent the time writing it trying to just cope with myself and make myself feel worth something and nearing the end of it, I just wanted everyone I knew to read the essay and just think that they're worth something and that they're not alone and they can do so many great things if they really put their minds and efforts into it. Brilliance to me is just the sort of pep-talk essay and I enjoy that I can read it now and totally agree with everything I wrote their and during lunch time one day, I was reading my whole compilation book and I remember I got goosebumps down my back while reading it. I really feel like the words expressed in the essay can hit home in the readers who read it and if not, then those readers are just a bunch of heartless bums.

If anything, I rather like looking back on the effort that was originally put into the essay way back when in 2010. Hey that rhymed! Anyway, back in 2010, I'd say that was the year I really, really got into philosophy and that was the one and only year I was just an essay factory and all my early blog posts in 2010 could show that. Nowadays, I think of myself as just more of the thinker that I eventually became over the last two or three years since my epiphany. I may not write as much essays as I did back then, but I definitely evolved as a philosopher. I'm definitely a lot more knowledgeable and have grown to be a very wizened young man and I'm sure everyone who reads this blog can agree that I have become a very intellectual person since 2010. With all that said, I think I put down the purpose of that essay pretty well. I don't really know why i wanted to just suddenly write to my blog why I wrote any of my more recognizable essay, but yeah, there's that thing going for me right now. And with my terrible memory, i won't keep this up daily. Just like I wanted my daily thought recordings to be daily.

Until next time,

Yours Truly

The promise and goal I kept

And also fulfilled as it may seem...

Readers, I'm glad to announce that from a bit of research and such into my development and much hard work, I think I may be finally budding my way into opening up to the world. I find myself much more at ease with me peers than ever thought possible before, being able to laugh and make jokes with them and everything else you teenagers normally do. I promised myself at the beginning of the year that seemed like it wasn't all that long ago to learn how to open myself up and ready myself for socializing for my career and independence from my mother. It has shown in numerous ways throughout the year that I have been able to open up and speak with others. Granted, it is still a bit rough around the edges and I still stay silent for most of my days during the school hours, but hey, every diamond mined is rough around its edges before it can be cut and refined and so too must my social skills be that way.
I am so very pleased with the work I have done in trying to open up and I do thank the people in school that have offered to even help me in opening up and this has been a journey all my own. I can only hope that by June 15th, I can go to project graduation and have fun with my 2012 graduating class as we all will on that glorious day and not stick with my mother the entire time. I hope to leave Burlington City High school knowing that I have done something good for myself and having worked hard at a skill all humans develop over their lives that I have completely shunned after preschool. I want to go to BCC in the fall of 2012 and show my teachers that I am a good man of good virtue and a man who once was a shy bud of a flower that needed to open up and let its petals show and I wish to show everyone my petals and flaunt my true colors because it has always been a wish of mine to be able to laugh and carouse with my peers just as I have done so many years ago. I just wish that I had gotten the right kind of motivation to be able to train myself into opening up a lot sooner in my school career than I had done. It was also a reason that I originally wanted to join the Arrowhead because I felt that if I was going to reach out to my fellow students and the staff of the school, that was the only way I was going to do it, but now, I feel that I can be able to open up and not rely so heavily on Project: Evergreen as I have done the previous year when I first joined the newspaper to start the opinion piece.

I still feel I may have a ways to go, but way to go me,
Yours Truly

My thoughts

I guess since I'm a self-proclaimed philosopher, I should start blogging my daily thoughts throughout the day.
This day started off with trying to rework what I had through of the previous night and also trying to remember if I had a dream last night. Almost gave me a danged headache while I was getting dressed for school today. Then I watched the NC10 news with my brother the rest of the morning after breakfast and coffee. It was mostly hysterical and I had no thoughts during this time as he was making fun of the news crew, especially the female anchor who he said had a huge head and the male anchor who definitely had a huge nose. So after those jokes, we watched a human bobblehead doll and Pinnochio tell the morning news until the Today show came on at 7. Boy did I have a laugh after my brother figured out that the Today show crew perfectly resembled the news crew in family guys, for anyone who's watched Family Guy, you guys should probably know what I'm talking about.
During school, I thought about having afternoon treats with the cookies my specialty foods table packed away first period and what fun it would have been to share the cookies with my family so we can all enjoy them. Journalism class was probably the most interesting thought pattern. During Journalism, i was thinking about relations with the human race and how, if we took out certain things that affect us the most right now, how they would drastically change our daily lives as a whole. Such as paper money or religion(Be warned, I'm always thinking about how life might be different without religion). Then after first study hall, sixth period, I forgot my lunch box of cookies! Oh no! The horror, guys! It took me looking for my lunch box after my second study hall seventh period nap to figure out I had forgotten my lunchbox. No good thoughts after figuring out this dilemma, guys. It was all thoughts of how I'm such an idiot for leaving behind such delicious cookies and also of how to get them back and reclaim my lunch box. Sixth period study hall room door was locked after ninth period though. Dang nabbit!

So those were the day's thoughts. Join me next time for tomorrow's thoughts if I can remember to get them on here. At this point, in all honesty, I really need something to blog about on a daily basis.

The End

Readers, I have been hard at work revising my essay, Center of Man and let me tell you. The revisions have finally been completed. All that's left now, is to right the whole thing down on separate pieces of paper and then once that's done, I can get it onto this blog for you guys to read and enjoy. So far, it's been a wonderful journey of exploration. A lot of work has been put into the essay, I've done plenty of research on my various topics in order to back up my stances and I've cut down on dragging out the sentences in the original piece and extended the work from its original three page total to a full nine pages, front and back. It is going to be the greatest work i've ever written so far and I hope you all enjoy it as well when it's finally on the blog.

Until then,
Yours Truly

Existentialism and me

Lately, as in these past few months, I've been questioning the human thought process and questioning the human mind in general, so I thought that one day while in school I would look up philosophy on wikipedia again as I have done previously over 2 years ago and I found that existentialism, like transcendentalism, matched up with what I was starting to think of. Thus, I decided that since I already was moving more away from transcendentalism anyway even while still clinging to some of the wisdom left behind by Thoreau, I would take in existentialism as well and make a new philosophy to practice for myself. Earlier on, over the summer, I started to really break down the existence of God and any other deity and I read something about that idea, I can't remember where or what, but it was on that subject, anyway, it was the idea of Materialism. Materialism is quite interesting to me. It's the idea that everything that's present and real is actually real, while anything else like a deity or something that's intangible or anything like that, is not. Basically when it comes to a god, it does not exist no matter what, because it does not have any real origin.
Speaking of Gods, if I were to choose to believe in any sort of pantheon or god at all or whatever, my best pick would be the Egyptian pantheon of gods, since they actually have a credible origin. They said that all of their gods came from a star in the night sky, I can't remember which, but yes, the star they pointed out was in fact real, and nobody knew about that star until hundreds of years later, when someone finally had the common sense to look up and actually find the danged star in the night sky. Thus, Egyptians were right, Christians were wrong.... or maybe everyone else other than the Egyptians?
Moving on, about materialism, everything has to have an origin, OK, I believe that too, I'll take it and put in my pocket and forget about it next morning. With transcendentalism, materialism, and now existentialism, it could only mean one thing for me. I will coin eclecticism! Yes, a type of philosophy for the thinking ADD-sufferer. It should be something that holds core belief with the three aforementioned philosophies while totally agreeing that no idea about man, nature, or anything thereof, cannot be held credible until tangible evidence is brought up to prove it.

Make way for Eclecticism,

Yours Truly

Weid Dream

This morning, I had a weird dreamin which my brother, my friend Brian and myself were being bullied by a couple of chumps who had access to kerosene and apparently knew how to set things on fire since at one point, they came in on bikes trying to set us on fire. I was drenched in the kerosene but ended up high tailing it out of there, apparently narrowly avoiding becoming Roast Ryan. All three of us did apparently thanks to their poor aim.
A bit later, I decided I had had enough of them and decided to engage on the field of combat via sword fight. Thing is, I was evenly matched with the one who accepted my challenge by being smart enough to defend himself from getting clubbed with a large pipe. Finding we were evenly matched in our sword fighting prowess, I dropped my weapon and decided to book it. At which point I returned to my brother and Brian. The two of them suggested I go to the chumps and talk sports with them. Thus, I did and I got them engaged in a wonderful conversation about hockey.
I guess the moral of the story would be "Get into sports, someday it'll save your life" Onl my part, that's a rather terrible moral. And since when am I evenly matched in a sword fight in a dream? If anything, I should've clubbed the daylights out of the wimpy bully. Indeed, he was a wimpy bully, because he and the other chump looked like a couple of chumps I could have batted the heads off of with the giant pipe I had.

Still wondering about that sword fight,

Yours Truly