Bad times.

Several days ago, my girlfriend and I had our first real fight in some time. Of course, as often, it seemed to stem much more from a lack of communication than anything else. We have since worked through it, and we are both feeling much better, at least as I can see.

The fight served to highlight things as they have been going lately. My life has not been as stellar as it can be, for the last month or so, and for the most part, I took it out on her. I blamed her for my own failings, and of course sought with this an excuse to break up with her, something which is startlingly close to my mind at all times, to both of our dismay. However, I had the wisdom to see past the minor issue of my life being slightly down, though I did not communicate this to her properly.

But the things that were problematic, are much the same ones that have been problematic since the beginning. I am a perfectionist, in every area of my life. Most rigorously, this applies to my own standards of living, that I hold myself to working hard and playing harder, being extreme in all decisions, and trying at all times to be the best that any man can be. The problem, of course, is that I hold my friends to this standard as well, and this is one of the core issues at the heart of things. This causes distress to our relationship, not because it is something that cannot be dealt with, but because it is not something that can be dealt with permanently, and it will continue to haunt us, for as long as it lasts. No matter how long the two of us spend our lives together, I will always question our relationship, simply because I hold myself to this high standard, and for the most part, she does not.

Then, of course, there is the problem of how my life has been going in recent times. I was rejected from the Scotland study abroad program, a rejection that hurts though I knew that it must happen. I have selected, in lieu of my only real choice, to go to France, more to entertain myself than to pursue my studies. There is of course no point in continuing to fight a battle that is already lost; the best soldier fights even when the battle is hopeless, but the wisest one lives to fight another day. I know that the Scotland program was the only place where I could have properly advanced my education, and I deserved to get in, but I have no reason to whine and moan of it. I am going to France, not for the better, but perhaps not much for the worse.

There has also been my writing. I have gotten little done since the end of my vow of silence. Even then, what I have been writing is the second draft of material that I have already developed, I have not been writing new material. I am restless, yet at the same time I cannot write. I have been lazy and unable, and this does not please me. Indeed, my writing the second time around is much better, but at the same time this is not enough. I need to work more. Since break, and returning to school, I have done a little more writing, but I have still not surpassed the point of my first draft, and I have not written as much as I wish to.

And then, there has been a questioning of myself in general, a minor existential crisis, which has plagued me for the past few weeks. My studies in Taoism have begun to take their toll. The taoist sage does nothing, and by this he does everything. This is at odds with the lifestyle I have lived, of doing everything in order to do everything. I seek the proper balance here, of knowing when to act and when not to act, of when to do everything and when to do nothing, for Taoism is not perfect, and the higher meaning of the tao cannot be everything as contained in the pages that I have read, indeed, "The tao can be talked about, but not the eternal tao." There is a better tao than the one presented, a fuller one, but I have fallen into the trap of taking taoist words at their face value, believing them by blind pursuit more so than using them and creating with them a better and proper balance for my life.

As such, I have questioned all of my actions extensively, I have felt melancholic, and I have been in harsher moods than normal. This was not helped by my vacation, during which I achieved very little by my standards. But this fight marks a turning point, an active dialog with my problems, rather than a general stewing in it.

I must again thank my girlfriend, for this fight has done more to help me than a thousand happy days, this conflict has aided me more than all the support she could have ever given me. She has helped me set my thoughts right, and begin in a new and better direction.

Honesty.

When I was little, my mother told me that honesty was the best policy. Indeed, there are numerous proponents from virtually every sector that tell us that telling the truth is vital, that we know the best men because they are honest and fair. This is bullshit. This has always been bullshit.

It appears that for thousands of years, we have known that honesty is the proper virtue to be valued. And why not? We have a society predicated on the truth. We have a world that depends on the verity of every word we say. What is so hideous about lying? It is a denial of this truth. It is a perversion of order. It is the process of creating a little gem of information which appears to be true and honest, but is in fact the exact opposite. Why is this important to our society? Only because we could have it no other way.

When a man speaks, we first assume that what he says is true. That is because we have put a positive value on the identification of language. That is, that when a make speaks, language has a tendency to tell the truth, and society a necessity for this truth to exist in order to continue existing. Why is a lie so terrible then? Because it violates this order. To cut it down to simple situations, only two societies can exist. In one, everyone must lie all the time, and telling the truth is a hideous violation of this. In the other, everyone must tell the truth all the time, and lying is the violation. We have a society founded on truth, on fact, and therefore our society is the latter.

Thus, to lie is to undermine progress, to deny civilization, to ignore everything that exists in favor of hideous and perfect fantasies which cannot exist, if only because they are too perfect to be true. It is easy to see, then, why we tell our children that lying is a sin.

But the fact that so undermines this process, is that the adult in charge doesn't really mean this. Even this value of honesty is a lie for them. There exists nowadays, there has always existed, there always will exist, this fact. Adults tell their children not to lie. But everyday, they go out and they tell lies whenever it serves them, whenever it will make their own life easier. They mislead others, they hold back their feelings, they provide half-truths and mostly-falsehoods, all so that they can satisfy their own selfish goals, goals which will harm them in the long term.

I am no communist. I am not one to say that the state rules over man, and that man has no right but in the state. Who am I to say that men are only cogs in the machine? Ayn Rand has taught me at least that these are not true. But Ayn has no universal truth either. It is also true that man is not a distinct individual, that while the state is his own construct and his own working, he must at the same time understand that he must bow down to it as well, if it is to work. He must understand that petty selfishness is not the same thing as individuality, and that denying something does not make it any less true.

My parents told me never to lie. As a child, this earned me the favor of my parents. Now, as an adult, it only earns me the harsh derision of my fellows. Why is this? Is it better to be open and honest, or to hide what I am and spend my days avoiding myself, to speak nothing of others. The man who is scorned in the eyes of others suffers nothing in comparison to the man who is scorned in his own eyes. I know. But why is this? Why does this world so claim to value honesty, so uphold it and its virtues, when in fact it wishes nothing of the fact? Why is it that this world praises the strong, while working so hard to prevent everyone from becoming so? This world is a masochistic one, and this world is of our own making.

I am also shocked by this disparity between children and adults. By this model, in which we mislead our children and uphold for them false values that we will quickly forget when we grow up and realize that these values are harder than originally expected, we are only hurting our children. Rather than treating them as children, as tiny adults, we are treating them as another race, another people, from another existence entirely. We are upholding for them a style of life that does not exist.

Children are told to hate violence, to abhor evil, to uphold truth, safety, law, etc. etc. etc. But as soon as they become teenagers, we drop on them that the world is curiously about none of these things, as if puberty has somehow and suddenly changed them, transported them into a new world where everything is exactly the opposite.

Do you understand what I say when I mean that we should treat our children as small adults, and not as small aliens? In our current model, we tell them of a lifestyle that does not exist, and hold it up for them as virtue. Is it not better to hold up the real world that does exist, and show them the real virtues? We need not drop it all on them at once, in great amounts, because they are children. I am not saying that we must not treat them as such. We must release on them the information of the world in a smaller flow, so as to allow them to understand. But we must release on them the information of this world, because if we do not we are only hurting them rather than helping them, we are misleading them instead of helping them grow.

I can think of no reason why we should not be open and honest with our kids, at an early age. Certainly, they cannot be burdened to learn, in the first few years, while they try to comprehend the language and the basics of living itself. But in the years of grade school, when they can comprehend and learn, why not teach them reality, rather than this ideal and false world of happiness and butterflies that we currently push off on them without remorse? This doesn't harm them. God knows, if it could harm us, it would do it when we are adults, and it does. There are many ways in which children are inferior to adults. Grasping the basic tenets of society is not one of them.

The utter mass of filth which does just this, treating toddlers like some kind of idiot weakling that cannot possibly comprehend that life is complicated, that yes, we sometimes lie, and sometimes tell the truth, and virtue lies not in telling the truth but in knowing when to and when not to, is disgusting. Children's tv shows, books, magazines, everything about children is tailored as if they were some sort of disconnected being, as if they lived in a different universe. This is not right, this only leads to more being dumped on them later, when they begin to see through the shoddy craftsmanship of this false life, on more hardship and toil than would have previously.

Do you understand? By treating your children as if they are not old enough to do something, as if their age is a detriment to them, you are harming them. I am evidence enough. I turned out right. Isn't that bad enough?

The State of the Educational System Today.

I have recently received the notice as to my rejection from the Scotland study abroad program offered through my school.

My anger is infinite. My anger is the volcano which burns the forests. My anger is the lightning which splits stone, and the stone that carries the mountain with it as it falls. My anger is the force of a gun, strained into thought. My anger is the surging sea.

But in all fairness, I don't care very much. It's what I've expected. I'll be honest, my gpa is far from exemplary. Good, but far from exemplary. But it's why my gpa is low that this whole thing kind of makes me angry. You see, my gpa is low, not because I'm too stupid to perform otherwise, but because I don't have any care to. I've long since learned that grades are essentially meaningless. Certainly, they are a crudely effective indicator, but as I see it they should never be treated as anything else.

The methods available to the current society to test the intelligence of an individual are all woefully lacking. The idea of writing a paper is essentially the idea of turning in a subjective work to be subjectively judged. You can never be sure if you're going to get a good grade on the paper, no matter how well you write, because you can never be sure what the teacher is looking for. Tests, on the other hand, are also crude. They encourage the taker to cram knowledge that will promptly be forgotten, and focus on specific topics that generally represent only a fraction of the real knowledge involved in the subject.

In order to illustrate the difficulties, let me give you an example. A teacher decides to give his students a test. He tells them ahead of time, as many teacher do, what kind of topics he considers important, and thus what material the test will cover. Three students go home and study.

One student gets an excellent grade. But then, he spent exorbitant amounts of time memorizing principles by rote, and he has no understanding of these principles or ability to connect the dots. He is an idiot.

One student gets a terrible grade. He is very intelligent, and spent his time studying the material. Unfortunately, he was not made aware of which specific portions of the test he was supposed to study, and as such gets every question wrong, regardless of the fact that he knows every other aspect of the subject well.

One student gets an okay grade, because he properly crammed for the test. He promptly forgets this material, and when he graduates with his degree, he will know very little of what he actually studied. He is also an idiot.

Do you see the inefficacy of the concept of measuring knowledge in our society today? We have bound an abstract concept, intelligence, up into a series of letters grades, tests, and papers, which are really not a fair judge of intelligence. This isn't even taking into account that intelligence appears less to be rote memorization, and more the ability to memorize more quickly and more efficiently than others. Even apes can be taught sign language. Even idiots can be taught physics. The difference between the idiot and the genius, is that the genius understands this, and while our tests do make an effort at judging this understanding, it is far too easy to slip past the system without understanding that education in general is suffering.

On top of this is the fact that education in general has been highly cheapened. Once, men went to college to learn, and only the most serious of scholars, the people endowed with the most willingness to learn, ever went. They went by free choice, and they learned because they wanted to. Nowadays, society is increasingly structuring itself to the point where men and women need a college degree simply to be ordinary, simply to catch up with the basic level of living. The side effects of this are obvious. Now, students spend their weekends partying hard enough to kill any grain of knowledge or gain in critical thinking skills that they built up during the week, and look upon their studies not as a joyous upward mobility of the intellect, but rather a dreary and tiresome job, a task to be completed and resolved as quickly as possible.

Since my years in high school, I have kept the love of knowledge and intellect closer to my heart than anyone I have yet known. I am constantly now either sharpening my intellect or resting it for the next day's labor. I am prudent in my vices and voracious in my attempts to learn and build anew. I understand that grades mean little, and that they never have. It is true that many geniuses have had problems in traditional school. I make no claim to be ranked among them, for I am a foolish teenager. But I can understand their pain, because schools are increasingly geared, not to teach, but to give the appearance of teaching. Those that suffer are those that wish to learn.

In my pursuit of true knowledge over falsity, I have naturally ignored my grades. I churn out cheap papers to give the appearance of acquiescence, and then spend the time saved reading, thinking, writing, processing, creating anew. I spend the excess time learning. Perhaps it is not in the fields in which they want me to learn. But who cares about what they want me to learn? I only care to learn at any cost. Behind the efforts of my homework, and my social life and necessary relaxations, I spend my time reading philosophy (of which I have recently taken an interest in eastern philosophy, with quite wonderful results), and working on my novel.

This being said, if there was anyone more fit to make it into a competitive program based on their worth and will to learn, it would be myself. I try to be a humble man, though I fall short in this on many accounts, but there is one thing that I flaunt, as I have flaunted since I was a child. I am smart. I am fucking intelligent. I am perhaps one of the smartest students in this school. As a child, I was mocked for my intelligence, a mockery that I have since learned to ignore. I make no apology for my mind.

And it seems to me, that my mind is exactly what should be getting me into this program. Many aspects of my application were excellent. There was only one place in which it lacked, and this was my gpa. Should I be penalized for deciding that writing a novel is more important than writing a flimsy essay on some topic for which I have no care for or aptitude with? Should I be penalized for realizing that there is more to the world than an arbitrary letter? Yes, apparently.

I'm not going to say that no one who got into that program deserved it. Two of my close friends made it into the program, and I can assure you that they deserved it. But many of the other people in my graduating class? Of this I cannot be sure. What I can be sure of, is that if you lined them up in front of me, there will be at least one idiot with good grades who is less deserving of the honor than I.

I love.

I love life.

I love being young, and I will love being old. I love eating, and I love being hungry. I love drinking, and I love being thirsty. I love to clean my room, I love to dirty it again. I love difficult endeavors, and I love easy distractions. I love writing, and I love reading. I love sleeping and dreaming, and I love waking. I love playing to win, and I love playing to lose. I love woman, and I love man. I love women in particular, and men in particular, and I love being able to tell which is which.

I love a quiet night spent in reflection and solitude, and I love a noisy night spent at a party with friends. I love to look out on the world and see the numerous colors and lights, and I love to be surrounded and enveloped by the choking darkness. I love being unlimited, I love being restricted. I love up, I love down. I love strength, and I love weakness. I love getting my way, and I love it when others get their own.

I love to exercise, I love to eat healthy, I love to continue this bodily existence, I love to smoke, I love to drink, I love to destroy this bodily existence.

I love love, and I love hatred.I love the ability to distinguish between the two.

I love happiness, and I love sadness. I love the intelligent, and I love the stupid. I love the great and I love the tiny. I love the rich and I love the poor. I love the winter, and the summer, and the spring and the fall. I love sound, and I love silence. I love to be clean after a shower, I love to dirty myself all over again. I love to speak, and I love to remain silent. I love people, and I love to mock them. I love myself, and I love to mock myself.

I love dinner, breakfast, and lunch. I love fashion, I love the plain dress of a beggar. I love hermitage, and I love sociality. I love communism, I love capitalism. I love objectivism, I love subjectivism. I love God, and I love man alone. I love dualism, I love monism. I love the philosopher and I love the sophist. I love sports, and I love the pleasures of the mind.

I love until the phrase "I love" no longer has meaning. For this reason, I must distinguish between my loves, and it is for this reason I am a man. I have found the basic principle, and I understand that it cannot be lost. I have in me the spark of the positive, a spark that is not available in many, and a spark that will drive me further than a man could dream, and yet not as far as he could wish.

I love life, and for this reason I will die. I have come to terms with this fact. It is for this reason that I will live forever.

Silence.

My second vow of silence began a week and a day ago. I meant to write this entry yesterday, but as it turns out I was too busy writing other things to have any time.

The vow has gone most excellently this time around. Having a room of my own means that I have the ability to retreat completely from my friends to a place that is mine, and is mine alone. Last year, I was often forced to go to the library to achieve the same thing, a place that was dangerously close to everything that I was trying to get away from. This year, I have spent hours upon hours, locked in my room, processing information and working, and there is nothing to disturb me except myself and my own desires.

I have also refined the vow, to be less of a vow of silence, and more of a vow of anti-sociality, or hermitude. As such, I am allowed to speak with people during and around class times, and I will allow myself to respond if someone greets me in the cafeteria, or otherwise wishes to speak with me, rather than simply running away and feeling bad for the people who don't know about my vow.

I have been extremely productive in this first week, though at the same time not as productive as I can be. I think that there has not been a day that I have not dedicated at least two or three hours to writing in some form or another, because my mind will simply not sit still right now. Poems fly into my head like doves, waiting patiently to be copied. The gears of my mind constantly grind at themselves, trying to figure out exactly what it is that my philosophy espouses, and I record these musings daily. Starting with the manuscript that I printed last year of the first third of my first novel, I have begun to rewrite it, better, and with a slightly revised and improved plot. All of these things converge at once, on me, and I very dutifully record them, with as much speed as my fingers can muster.

My meditations on death have not begun yet, not in earnest. I don't have much free time on the weekdays for meditation, and my first weekend was occupied more with writing than this pursuit. Yet, already I have begun to come to terms with death, not to love it or hate it, but for the time being to accept it. I have not yet conquered it, but I am on the proper path.

Yet, for all this, I am not in the proper mindset. This year I am tortured constantly, for my closer connection with people has not only allowed me to hide from them all the more effectively, but it has also made me more aware of their presence, and my lack of sociality in this life. The weekends that I enjoy with friends are gone, replaced by work. There is a part of me that knows that what I do to myself is torture, and that I must be sure not to do this for too long, not to accept this life forever. Indeed, recent developments in my philosophy have led me to a more taoist representation of the world, and the balance that I seek cannot be found in this place. It cannot be found in the social world either, which is why I despair. I try to make a proper balance, but it is too heavily weighted on both ends, it is always either leaned in one direction or the other. There is little that I can do.

Also, I must admit that poetry is a new sphere in my life, one that I have unfortunately admitted up until this point. A creative writing class with an excellent teacher has taught me the value of the poem, and has demystified the creation of one. It is for this reason that poetry is finally making its way into my life, after many years of being left to the side.

The collision of all these things is now the vision that so prominently displays itself on my mind. It is beautiful, and true, and yet it is not done yet. It is not complete, and I must work to make it whole. I have another three weeks worth of work in front of me.

On death.

It is very clear, when one examines it, that everyone has to die in the end. We do indeed have a creation, though we cannot remember it, and thus we must also have an end. But why is it that we love it so?

The purpose of every major religion has been to tell us that we will live on after we die. This seems unlikely, to my mind, as it preaches exactly what we wish to hear. Anyone who tells you what you want to hear likely wants something from you, even if it is simply your affection and fratitude. The problem is that this also cheapens the effect of living. If your greater rewards are to come next, then this life must be ignored. But if there is no life after this, what then? What possible purpose could we have for wasting this life in service of the next? And, more importantly, if the next life is the kind of one that we would enjoy, why would it do something so stupid as require that we sacrifice our first one?

I have been considering death, lately, as you can probably see. I have an admission to make. I hate it, and it terrifies me more than anything else in the world, for it is the exact negation of this world, it is the void of both nothingness and non-existence, the place in which everything that I have ever attempted will come crashing down. Death wipes clean the slate, a slate that myself, and every other self-respecting human being, has been struggling to build.

It is true, you can prolong your influence. Plato is still alive, thousands of years after his death. But if one member of a race is impermanent, than they all are. If a race is impermanent, then it tends to reason that it will end one day, on the slightest chance. Billions of years from now, the sun will explode. Unless we manage to escape our present solar system by that time, which I have heavy doubts as to, we will all be gone. That also fails to take into account human error. One maniac with a nuclear weapon in his hands could level the entire planet, were he given the chance. There are numerous scenarios like this, each of them with impeccably small odds. Yet, in the face of infinity, every odd will be tested. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. We will all die.

What then? Plato will cease to exist, even if we manage to faithfully keep him in our minds until doomsday. So will the rest of us. Some of us, the lesser ones, we will have already been dead and forgotten before then. Others, the great men who have left their impressions behind, will be leveled in the end, along with the rest. You can delay the complete and utter demolition of your being by making it worthwhile for others to know. But when the whole race ceases to exist, so will you, and this is an inevitability.

Schopenhauer says that, having existed for an eternity as inert matter, life is some sort of mistake, and in the end we will return to this matter. We can't really fear this, not without being in the right mind, because we will be just as happy after our lives as we were before; that is, not to have a consciousness. Yet, Schopenhauer was decidedly pessimistic. His view of life is negative. Mine is positive.

There are some who claim that living forever would be a burden, a bore. They feel that life only has meaning as long as this meaning is threatened, and that once it ceases to be, then so will their meaning. the only thing I have to say to these people, is that they had no meaning in their lives to begin with. Yet, there are some who have meaning in their lives, without the threat of death. There are some who live for things other than gratification, who create their own meaning, a world from their fingertips.

I am more bored by a life that ends than by one that continues. If I lived forever, I would be satisfied. I would seek constantly, to always understand, to always learn and push myself constantly further. My only regret is that I was not born at the beginning of time, and allowed to live until its very end. This would be the perfect life for me. Yet, it is not true. I was cursed with being born in a constant present, rather than allowed to transcend time altogether. If I could not have been born immortal, then at least I would have wished to be born nearer the end of time than this. This is certainly no end time, nor is it a beginning time. It is no golden age, but nor is it a dark age. It is worlds better than the past; it is nowhere near as interesting as the future will be. With history recorded, at least for the most part, the man in the future can relive the past. for this reason, existing in the future is always preferable.

Yet, I must face the fact that I will die. It is true, and inevitable. Perhaps I will take the easy road, and accept what religion has taught me. More likely, I will take the hard road, and make every attempt to transcend death and time altogether. I must begin by desensitizing myself to the concept of my own death.

As a concept, it scares me, to the pit of my stomach. I become physically sick when I truly consider that I will die, and utterly cease to exist. There will not even be a consciousness to consider that I am dead. There will be inert matter, and I will be gone. I must think about this, I must face it, in order to move past it. I must learn to both accept and reject death, and when I am done, I will live forever, regardless of what happens to my body in sixty or so years when I likely die. I must meditate on death, and learn not to fear it.

I think I will begin when I start my second vow of silence, within the next few weeks. I have planned it for winter quarter this year, as it seems more fitting, and less obtrusive into my social life. Here's to hoping that it will treat me as well as last year's.

Latecoming.

Christ, how long has it been since I updated this thing? Too long. I intended to write at least two blogs over break. Instead, I watched all of Fringe and wrote a lot. Now I'm back in school all over again. At least one thing of grand importance has happened to me. I've had a breakthrough, and a major one.

I'm over Ayn Rand. Not that I really mean this, so let me explain. Atlas Shrugged was the best thing to happen to high-school me. It was singlehandedly responsible for giving me hope for humanity, for pulling me out of the muck of my childhood, for destroying the liberal in me, for creating in me a new and better identity. But that's over.

I have spent the last couple years worshiping Ayn, although I would never admit it, and I didn't even believe it. It's true that in the very least I kept her ideas out of every argument, and managed to maintain a somewhat objective stance when talking about her. But hiding under this was the fact that I worshiped her, no matter how hard I denied it. Many of my ideas were hers, though I claimed that they were mine. Even where we did differ on opinions, mine were somehow based in the foundation that her work had laid for me.

Last quarter, I tried to get a fuller understanding of her philosophy, so that I could finally have a completely objective opinion on her work. What resulted was a realization of every bias that I have been secretly carrying. Her fiction work is fiction; it carries heavy philosophical themes, but it is far from any kind of proof or real evidence for the power of her ideas. Her philosophical work is almost disgusting to me, now. There is little proof, no evidence. It holds the ideas that it tries to prove as self-evident, and spends the rest of the time getting itself off.

Then, I picked up a text about her life, told through the eyes of Nathaniel Branden, a close colleague and sometimes lover. This opened my eyes. Ayn was essentially a terribly harsh, repressed, and biased person. She was violent in upholding her beliefs, and as her life went on, she degraded, coming to become everything that she denounces in her books. The whole time she holds herself as some sort of deity, ignoring every flaw in herself and believing that it must be some kind of strength. In short, she did not bear the characteristics of a competent philosopher.

The idea that I had most relied upon, as a result of my worship of her, was the notion that emotion is antithesis to reason. Her heroes are often coldly emotional, purely rational. It was not something that she specifically upheld, but it was one of the consequences regardless, and one that she suffered in her own life. I say suffer, because an understanding of her life proved that the separation of a being from his emotion may seem temporarily effective, yet it is far more damaging in the long run, and as any dedicated mind understands, it is the long run that is more important.

In my philosophy, there are three kinds of men. There are rational men, there are irrational men, and then there are sheep that have no real force of character, or personality of their own, they are only to be led by the previous two classes. My love of cold rationality and my championing of the rational man as the best kind of life naturally led to my attempts to emulate this life.

But I have realized now that there is a fourth class of man, the true ruler. He is the man who is both completely rational and completely irrational, the man who is superficially similar to the sheep, but only because he has transcended mankind altogether. The man who balances his emotions and reasons, while at the same time encouraging both; this is the best kind of man.

My own life has been hampered by my hatred for my emotions. Most notably is my love life, which has been troubled and confusing. My lack of emotion also hindered my writing, though at the time I believed that it was the only thing that permitted it. But this is all over now. I've come to this grand revelation, and it has fixed everything.

I am allowed to be emotional, and still be rational. This fact has just changed my life. Within the past couple of weeks, I have written better, and been more satisfied, than I have in most of my life. I have reached some sort of balance, and it has fueled me further in great force. I have been more open and real with people, and it has helped my plans as well. Everything is good.

I've arrived back at college, with a fresh outlook and far better force of will under my belt. other things have happened as well, less important ones. Romantic connections are being made, and friendships are finally developing the way I want them to. I'm reading well, writing well, working hard, and best of all, I'm happy about it.

Maybe I'll discuss a few of the things I meant to earlier, later. We'll see.