David B. Calhoun’s Blog

I’m sort of on a mission to undo a lot of damage that’s happened over the past couple of months, and some even over the past year.

For the past couple of months, going back to December or so, I’ve been increasingly convinced that I just don’t fit in with my group of friends, and even that some of them are ignoring me or avoiding me. But now this has been proved not to be the case. As it turns out, whether I like it or not, it’s just been in my head. This is the danger of overanalyzing. What has happened was what Mark has told me was a self-fulfilling prophecy: I assume I’m being avoided, so my response is to isolate myself. But in isolating myself, for whatever reason, I am in turn avoided because it’s assumed I want to be left alone. Then I interpret this as more of me being avoided.

In philosophy, it’s a virtue to overanalyze something. In real life, overanalyzing can make you lose friends.

I’m trying to work on not feeling like I fit in. As for the person I thought was avoiding me - I first sent them an email, and just now I called them and chatted with them for the first time in many months. I could feel what was at first awkward - trying to have casual conversation for the first time in a long time - but by the end of the call it almost felt normal.

I feel really bad about what my over-analyzing has done. By the end of the call I was close to crying, then after the call I was crying. I don’t remember the last time I cried. I used to cry so often in high school that I simply stopped, and as a consequence I sort of bottle up those emotions and cry rarely.

If it had been anyone else, I would probably have lost them as a friend by now. But I am really grateful that they are patient enough to bear with my stupidity.

I’ve alienated myself, and only I can undo it.

Something else I’ve been doing - and this somewhat ties into the above - is taking my family and friends for granted. I go out to dinner with my family often, but sometimes I bring along a book or whatever, with the intention of eating and really just not contributing to the conversation. But I don’t realize that this really is the time when we’re the closest. This is the time when everyone talks about what’s going on, etc. Apart from that, sometimes when I’m locked away in my room, my mom comes in and wants to chat about something, or she gives me a book she thought I’d like. She’s trying to interact with me, to bond with me. Yet at the time, I just think of these things as annoyances. I need to learn not to take these things for granted.

Another thing that ties into all of this is my anger. Usually I seem to be a pretty nice person, but when I get angry, which is rarely, I REALLY get pissed off. This has put me in danger recently. I haven’t written the story here, but in summary, a couple of weeks ago I followed another driver to his home and argued with him. The details are petty and can be left out, but the basic thing was that I had though the guy was in the wrong, and yet HE is the one who yelled at me and shook his fist as he passed me by. I didn’t want him to get away with that without me putting up a defense. Mind you, I didn’t yell and make obsene gestures back. I wanted to have a chat with the guy. It wasn’t smart of him to do this within blocks of his home. I followed him until he pulled into his driveway, and with his three or four year old daughter staring on, we argued back and forth over who was in the wrong. For up to several days after the incident, I hadn’t regretted it. But now I know I should’ve just ignored him. Not to mention that what I did was completely unchristian-like. I feel like a fool for driving around with an “Alumni, Biola University” license frame and yet I go around doing ridiculous stuff like this.

Also, what I did completely put my life in danger. If the guy had a gun he could’ve just shot me. I claim that I wouldn’t care much.. that it would be my family and friends that would mourn my death. But that’s completely selfish of me not to care about my life, and to put myself needlessly in danger like that, and over really really petty things. My mom said that she couldn’t sleep all through that night because she was thinking about me. She wrote me a note the next morning and put it on my computer monitor: “David, Next time, take a deep breath and think twice! Don’t let your anger put you in danger. The moment will pass - no eye contact and turn up the radio so you can’t hear the jerk. Mom”

When my actions start having this kind of affect on people, especially my mom, I have to re-evaluate myself and know that I’m certainly doing something wrong.

One last thing - perhaps at the heart of all of this - is my relationship with God. It was easy when attending Biola to say that I am a Christian. I attended chapels, prayed a lot, etc. When I graduated and started working, I guess you can say I really slacked off. I have never been one to attend church, and I unfairly place the blame on my family, who has never attended church. But before I consider attending church again, I need to be right with God. I haven’t prayed for a long time. I have often felt that God is there and has interacted in history before, but that he seems strangely silent in present times, and I don’t even know if my prayers are being listened to. Some people lose faith over unanswered prayers. I think I understand why not all prayers can be answered. But if I were to lose my faith, it would be because I don’t think my prayers are being listened to. Self-deception is very easy for praying Christians. Am I praying to myself or to my God? How can I tell the difference? This has always been a touchy subject for me.

Anyhow, I suppose all of this is coming up all at once right before Easter, and this is no coincidence. The celebration of Easter occurs in what used to be pagan celebrations. But this doesn’t change the fact of why we celebrate Easter. That Christ died and was resurrected is no trivial matter. His death was him putting himself on the offering plate. We, like other ancient cultures, used to have to give sacrifices in place of our sins. The sacrifices used to identify with us, and our giving of them in sacrifice used to be symbolic of the payment we gave God in admission of our sins. Christ, realizing this method was outdated and ready to be changed, gave himself as a sacrifice for our sins. This is the profound meaning it has for us, and the meaning has been lost to so many, especially because they themselves have never had to give actual sacrifices.

So in many ways this is a time to realize my many sins. I’ve described some of them above. I had no idea until recently that it was getting closer to Easter. I hadn’t planned on things coming to a breaking point like this. That they did and that I realized these sins before Easter is no coincidence, I think. Saying this, I realize just now that God must still work in the world. This wasn’t an answered prayer - this wasn’t even God listening to a prayer, because I haven’t been praying. This is God showing me that I have to realize my sins and CHANGE.. and improve. He is showing me that though I still sin, Christ sacrificed himself for these very sins. This is God interacting in the world today.

So after last post I pretty much decided not to go to the next “outing” my friends and I will go on.

But after today I feel the complete opposite. I miss my friends, I haven’t seen a lot of them for a couple of months. I want to see them even if it means some heartbreak.

My heart tears me one way, and my brain tears me the other direction.

My heart is a complete fool and my brain is utterly heartless.

How can you forget someone you haven’t seen for two months, and yet still dream about regularly? I know this is especially painful for me, because I hardly ever remember my dreams. I know there’s something going on when I actually remember what - or in this case, who - I was dreaming about.

I guess it’s also always painful when you know this other person hasn’t thought about you except for maybe once by chance during that whole time, and all this time you yourself are preoccupied with them.

Surely I’m not the only one with this problem? Maybe I’m slightly too neurotic, and I realize that, but there must be others like me out there.

And then I will eventually become normal again, and able to concentrate and think of other things. But here’s the perfect time for the process to repeat itself. Blaise Pascal said it well:

How tiresome it is to give up pursuits to which we have become attached. A man enjoying a happy home-life has only to see a woman who attracts him, or spend five or six pleasant says gambling, and he will be very sorry to go back to what he was doing before. It happens every day. (Pensees, #79)

How painful it is to be away and think of this person daily… but how much more painful it is to actually be with her! To see her and laugh with her, and to occasionally share a silent glance between us, and wonder what the meaning of it is, and to wonder if there is still some possibility. And she stands so close as to touch you, and yet still you wonder. Then in the next moment she is obviously standing as far away from you as possible. And then you try to sit with her, and she makes an excuse and moves away to another seat. Is it just a game? How far can we string on this poor misguided soul? I have never had the pleasure of manipulating people this way before, oh it is fun!

Soon our mutual friends will get together again for a movie or a show of some sort, and until then I’m in constant struggle of wanting to go and not wanting to go. I am tempted to go, but the logical half of me knows I’ll just be teased and disappointed. She may well flirt and lead me on, but by the end of the night she will simultaneously have moved her seat and strategically avoided me. I’m not a friend, I’m not a human being, I’m just a puppet being strung along and manipulated.

NO, I do not want to go. And yet I’m still being tugged. My heart wants to go, to enjoy myself and hang out with my friends. But my brain knows that my heart is gullible and easily broken, and will certainly be broken again. The only way to prevent that is to avoid seeing her ever again.

I want to move on. I know I will eventually move on. The same thing happened to me with a girl in high school. Why is it that this is my only experience with girls? Why do I repeatedly subject myself to this torment and pain? This has a dramatic effect on my well-being and I really shouldn’t let it bother me. But it does. It bothers me a great deal.

One of my friends says I should use my passion and divert it into something creative, such as writing or something. Other than these blog entries, which are just written as a way to cool myself off, I really don’t have the discipline to sit down and write a story. I never have had that discipline. And I’ve always felt I write lousy stories. I have great ideas for plot and characters, but I don’t have the skill to write it into something worth reading. I just don’t.

God, I know you exist, but I don’t know how much you interact in the world anymore, if at all. Please help me deal with this torment. I pray for this every night, and eventually it will pass, but I pray that it will pass sooner. I am not sad anymore, I’m just tired.. tired of life in general. I seem to always have been ready to give up completely, but I know that’s not an option. Please carry me forward, please take care of me, please protect me, please be my purpose here, please let me come to terms with myself, please give me strength, please give me peace, please give me love. I know I deserve none of these things, but I desire all of them.

I have this idea to write a paper on the ethics (or lack theoreof?) of filesharing.

That’s all.

(this is just a reminder to myself!)

I’m making a resolution. And this one is not too hard to keep.

It’s not to get married or get romantically involved with anyone.

Seeing as I haven’t had difficulty keeping this resolution up till now, I shouldn’t have trouble in the future.

Life is more than than this. There are now more divorces than successful marriages. There’s too many women who divorce and take all their husband has, including kids, and leaves the husband worse off than he would’ve been if he simply stayed alone.

So I will stay alone. I get to have no household disputes, fights over money, fights about or with children, etc. None of it will happen.

Pretty boring? Yes, at home. But the secret is not to stay at home all the time. Get out and enjoy the world. Read in coffee shops, etc.

It’s not too hard. Lonely maybe. But not hard.

I am getting to have a really unreasonably hatred toward certain online communities.

And when I mean “online communities”, I really mean: 4chan.org, ytmnd.com, the World of Warcraft forums, etc.

Each community has their own distinctive features: World of Warcraft forums are filled with people who, not satisfied with the normal butchering of the English language featured on the internet, take it a step further and make posts that are almost undecipherable.

The distinctive feature of the 4chan boards seems to be being unabashedly horny towards ALL THE WRONG THINGS. Pixelated animated Japanese women is one thing, but it’s quite another to be responsible for coining the word “Rule 34″ (look it up on Urbandictionary). That’s NOT something to be proud of.

Ytmnd is less of an issue for me nowadays, since I hardly ever visit that site anymore, but it generally has all the characteristics of what I hate about a lot of forums.

What seems to be common to all of them is an utter lack of respect for anyone - most posters seem to forget is that who they’re responding to is an actual HUMAN BEING behind the screen, who took the time to write a post. No doubt people would be more respectful if they were actually talking face to face. If people in real life acted the way they do on the internet, it wouldn’t be surprising if they were beaten to a pulp and kept from procreating, simply out of principle.

Another thing that I hate, other than lack of respect, is unoriginality. This is especially evident in posts that look like this:

Post 1. Hi guys! I’m wondering if I can find a picture of….
Post 2. Rule 34
Post 3. Rule 34
Post 4. Rule 34
Post 5. Rule 34
Post 6. Rule 34
Post 7. Rule 34
Post 8. Rule 34
Post 9. Rule 34
Post 10. Rule 34

Note that posts 2-10 are all by DIFFERENT POSTERS, who think they’re being cute.

ALRIGHT, WE GET IT ALREADY!! You can copy and paste! And you can parrot the previous poster. You think you’re being cute and clever. You’re not. You look like fools.

This is why I will always have more respect for, say, a forum on a website such as the Rational Responders - while I utterly disagree with their beliefs and their methods for spreading their beliefs (atheism), I have so much more respect for a community such as theirs, that values well-reasoned and respectful (MOST of the time) replies to posts. Contrast this with the garbage, utter nonsense, and retarded behavior that’s only acceptable in certain corners of the internet.

Maybe the internet has allowed these places to thrive because people still want to act like children and avoid growing up and acting like an adult?

Argg, ok, enough ranting. I had to get that off my chest. I hope I’m not the only one who feels this way.

One of my favorite websites, Stage6, has been hacked and has been offline all day :(. Think of Stage6 as YouTube, but 1000x better quality.

Freakin hackers - you’re supposed to take down the BAD websites, not the good ones. I’m sure no one would mind seeing microsoft.com hacked. Although, I’d imagine it would be a lot harder, since they probably have more security measures in place. Just imagine, they must have a guy who sits there all day, refreshing the site to make sure it’s still up and working.

Anyhow, sad day for it to go down, too, being a Saturday and all. All the techs are home playing video games. Looks like we’ll wait till Monday until it’s up again!

So I quit World of Warcraft. Again.

I’ve had a sort of love-hate relationship with the game. At times I spent way too much time on it, improving my character and such, and wondering in awe if people really actually spent MORE time than I did playing. They do, of course, because there were always people with better gear than me.

Anyhow, I started playing shortly after the game came out. The game was released in November 2004, and I finally picked it up in January 2005, and was always struggling to catch up to my friends who had started it before I did. I kept playing until sometime mid-2006, when I devoted myself full-time to work and school, and writing my Philosophy Thesis.

When the expansion, Burning Crusade, was released in January 2007, I picked up a copy and played it for about a month before realizing that it was really just more of the same stuff. Go here, get this quest, kill 80 boars, bring this guy back the head of so-and-so. There WERE a few new and fun quest types, like one where you had to throw down bombs from a gryphon rider. But for the most part it was just more of the same stuff. So I quit sometime in February.

Come January 2008 and, after not having played for a year, I start thinking about how fun it would be to play again. One of my friends had even logged back in so he could get his character up to the level cap, level 70. I spent the next month or so trying to finally get to level 70 (I had quit at level 65). Most of the quests and instances were the same stuff as before, just rehashed and given a different name. I do admit that there were a couple of pretty different and fun quests. There was this one quest that stands out in my mind right now - it was one where you somehow transform into a squirrel so you can sneak into this ogre camp and taint their beer kegs. I kid you not! The best part about it was that you could actually STEALTH. It was hilarious to see the squirrel go into stealth mode. You even had the ability to distract your enemies with a “Throw Acorn” spell. I remember messing around in “squirrel mode” around this one Alliance character for a while, just for the heck of it, because it was so fun.

Anyhow, I digress! The thing is, once I got to level 70 last week, the same old level cap wall hit me. Unless I had ridiculous amounts of time to spend in dungeons or PvP (player versus player) matches, I really didn’t stand a chance against everyone else. So I PvPed in the old, familiar, and boring PvP battlegrounds for a while, got some decent stuff, and then realized that I wasn’t really enjoying myself. It was just becoming another grind. And to top it off, when Blizzard supposedly releases their expansion this year, all this effort will become worthless.

So basically what I’m trying to say is, the best part of the game is leveling up. The worst part of the game is when you hit the level cap.

Also, it wasn’t fun leveling up from 65 to 70, because for the most part my friends weren’t logged on. There had been a time when we all got on Skype and quested and did instances and had a good time, but gone are those days!

I’ve also become annoyed with the player base, which is another terrible part of the game. Most everyone on there is out for their good, or the good of their guild, and nothing more. And there is a large group of people who don’t think twice about using exploits and cheating to get ahead. “It’s all part of life”, they say to try to justify it.

In WoW, there is NO honor.

When I used to play Red Baron 3D, a WWI combat flight sim, after a dogfight each player would salute each other. In World of Warcraft, after you’re killed by your opponent, they spit on you.

That about sums it up.

Last night I took off all my hard-earned gear and sold what I could of it. What I couldn’t sell I destroyed. I sold/destroyed everything in my bags and everything in my bank. I completely destroyed everything I worked hard to earn up to that point, then gave all my gold to my guild. I did the same with my level 60 alternate character.

Somewhere there is a naked troll rogue and a naked undead priest having coffee together.

What’s so hard with forgiveness?

Especially in Christianity, forgiveness is regarded as a real virtue. When someone has done us wrong, it shows great maturity that we could honestly forgive them.

But why is it so hard sometimes? Because we know that the person will probably do us wrong again, but the next time they won’t be as surprised when they’re forgiven. That’s my fear anyway. I’m afraid of being exploited for my forgiveness. This is along the lines of “turn the other cheek” - just how much should a person yield to another person? Should someone ever take a stand, and NOT turn the other cheek? Shouldn’t we expect there to be times like this?

Similarly, should there be times when people are not forgiven?

I don’t know - I’m beyond pessimistic about this world, and so far I’ve been pretty much hopeless in it. Forgiveness is something I’ve always known to be a virtue and a great thing, but maybe because of some past experiences I’ve just found it extremely hard to forgive as of recently. I want to protect my heart - I don’t want people to destroy it, have me forgive them, then leave my heart open for another attack.

I guess this comes more out of recent circumstances than anything else.

Sorry, my thoughts are a mess tonight, and there’s no easy way to organize all of this, so I’ll just leave it.

I live in Los Angeles, one of the largest cities in the world. It’s not by choice - this is where my family planted itself about a century ago, after moving away from the farming life in rural Kansas, in search of better jobs and a better life.

More and more of the world is becoming urbanized, we’re told. More of the world is becoming like congested, smoggy Los Angeles.

There are plenty of great things about the city - plenty of choices for entertainment, dining, schools, etc. Contrast this with a small town, where the choices for entertainment are the local bar or the bowling alley, the choices for dining are Cafe #1 or Cafe #2, and where you only have one school to choose from, unless you want to drive out on the interstate 100 miles one-way.

Of course the main draw to the big city is the opportunity for jobs. As a result, rent is driven up and it forces single people to get together and share rent.

But what is the problem with the metropolis? It’s precisely the best and worst thing about the city: the fact that there’s so much choice. This is probably partly to blame for the high divorce rate in the US. Why stay together when you have literally millions of other options? This is also why it’s so easy to have an affair. If your spouse doesn’t satisfy you, all you have to do is leave your dwelling and confidently look for someone who WILL satisfy you.

I’ve always thought the metropolis was also harmful to organized religion. In the small rural town, the church would be the epicenter - the thing that brought everyone together. And you would have just one church. Contrast this with the big city - you have dozens of churches in your immediate area, and a lot more than that if you’re willing to drive a little farther. The free market capitalism that improves businesses in competition with each other in the city also affects churches. Why stay at this boring church, where the pastor rambles on and on and where the people are snobbish, when you can join a better church that’s a short distance away? In business, this prompts competition, but in terms of churches, this usually ends up in a mass exodus from one church to another, and the slow, eventual death of the former church.

In the small rural town, you were stuck with what you had. This was a bad thing, but this was also a good thing: if people have no other choice but to go to that church, then they might as well make the best of it and try to improve and contribute to that one church, to make it just a bit better.

The same with marriages: in a small rural town, there’s not a lot of selection for a spouse. If you are lucky enough to find one, you will bend over backwards to compromise and make the marriage work. Or you will simply be unsatisfied in a marriage, but will stay together for convenience, or for the children.

Nowadays, the city promotes the idea that if you’re unhappy with whatever you have, be it your job, your spouse, your church, your friends, etc, you can simply dispose of them and easily find new ones. How degrading, and how depressing to be a piece of human waste, used and then disposed of in favor of something else.

How can someone survive in such a hostile environment?