Ah, Xanga. How nice of me to be here once again after about nearly a two-year hiatus.

I'm not quite sure why I'm blogging right now nor am I even sure if I have anything really meaningful to say. I just figured I would go on here and yammer on until my thoughts and words finally aligned with my fingers and keyboard to construct at least a somewhat meaningful blog.

As I just mentioned, I don't know why I'm on here after not having touched this website for so damn long. Perhaps the reason is because I am hoping on the off-chance that someone reads this. That someone out there sees this and is interested enough in not what I actually say but maybe interested in the fact that I even say anything at all -- regardless if it's utterly bullshit.

Anyways, my days have gotten much better since the end of my first year of college after I dropped out. Looking back on my entries from 2011, I understand now why I sounded like such a prick at the time: I was sad and confused. The root of it can be credited to my inability to accept reality for what it is and its never-ending fountain of paradoxes.

UCI chewed up my soul, man. It rearranged everything I ever knew about myself in relation to everything else and turned it so far inside-out that by the end of it all I was one sad motherfucker. Sure, I was sharper and more quick-witted. But, damn, was I depressed as shit. I felt like I was being driven through a Universal Studios tour but instead of being treated to a short, lovely theatrical ride, it was a grueling, year-long tour of the chaotic bullshit and absurdity of living and being alive in the real world. They woke us up from our public education slumber and opened our eyes to the full-frontal bullshit that life oftentimes is.

For one whole year, Humanities Core taught us to question everything. And I mean EVE-RY-THING. We were taught to do this because by doing this we can come to the realization that there is nothing outside of reality that could not be stripped of its credibility. Everything is subjective and open for discussion. The closest thing to truth is theory and even that is still speculation at best. And, so, the class brought me to this final conclusion: the only truth is that there is no truth.

Now, this made me angry at first. But then I got over that initial feeling, and left over was this deeply instilled anxiety that I have never experienced ever in my entire life. This ultimately led to my depression.

I mean, if everything we know about the world could be deconstructed to bullshit subjectivity, then what the hell is real and where do I stand among all this?

Take free will. If there is a God, how can anyone be free if everything is already predetermined? Nowadays, we understand that the world operates in accordance with some fundamental physical laws, and these laws govern the behavior of every object in the world. But look at us. We're just physical systems as well. We're just a complex arrangements of carbon molecules. We're mostly made of water so it's not like our behavior is going to be an exception to those basic physical laws. So it begins to look like whether it's God setting up everything in advance and knowing what the outcome is or whether it's these basic physical laws governing everything that happens. It becomes apparent that there's actually not a lot of room left for freedom. So now we might be tempted to just ignore the question; ignore the mystery of free will. But we can't. The question keeps staring us right in the face. Take individuality, for example, or who we are. We associate who we are with the free choices we make and take responsibility for. We can only be held responsible or found guilty or admired or respected for things we did by our own free will. So the question keeps coming back and we don't have any real solution for it. It starts to look like all our decisions are just a charade.

This is a scary thought and only one of several paradoxes I struggled to become content with as I endured crippling depression.

I hate to end it here so abruptly without much resolution but I'm tired. The purpose of this blog was simply to express myself and I feel like I have adequately done just that. Farewell, anonymous readers. Until next time.

With not much else to do, recently I've been thinking a lot about what reality is. Ever since I saw Waking Life -- a philosophical film I recommend to anyone curious about heavy topics such as death, free will, personal identity, and the different modes of consciousness -- I have become obsessed with lucid dreaming and my own sense of self (for anyone not familiar with the term lucid dream, it is a state of consciousness in which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming). One of the comments that stuck out to me is when one of the characters mention, "people are either sleep-walking to their waking life or wake-walking to their dreams." To the core of it, what this essentially means is that our dream state and our waking life are pretty much one and the same. Think about it. The wide majority of us never actually take or have the time to live in the present moment. Like ants, we travel from one moment to the next, remembering then forgetting, performing one task after another. Very rarely do we ever take the time to note how or when we arrived at where we are right now.

The reason I bring this up is because two days ago I decided to try out meditation. What I do is I sit very still on a pillow for some odd minutes with my legs crossed, my neck long, and my eyes closed. In this position, I let all my connections to the external world go and just feel my body and its various senses and drives. Supposedly, this is what "being in the moment" entails: stopping for a minute or two and just sitting the fuck down to actually experience the moment in full.

Today, after one of my sessions of meditating, I laid back on my pillow and just stared for the longest time at the light on the ceiling. While staring at it and surveying all of its features in miniature detail, I realized something about myself: I tend to see objects more with my mind than I actually do with my eyes. Never before have I noticed the hazy contrast between the illumination of the light and the shadows it creates in the areas of the room it cannot permeate. The break between dark and light is so hazy that it almost appears as if the break does not even exist. Perhaps the haze between illumination and shadow is infinite? Every day, I walk into the room and flip the light switch without ever noticing the beauty in this because my mind is so cluttered with chaotic images of school, friends... life! On any given moment, I can stare at that same light but instead be entranced by the images of my daydreams rather than its minute details. If I really wanted to, for entertainment I can waste my entire life staring into space, depriving myself in the process of the physical beauty which already exists around me.

Ask yourself: is this idea insightful, or is it merely the manifestation of a man suffering from the pangs of extreme boredom?

I hate it when mad people are told they need to chill.

Seriously. It accomplishes nothing.

Lesson learned.

I should have listened to Richard Dawkins. It is fucking useless debating with idiots. They only listen to what they want to hear, and then they reject everything else. The fun dies once you realize your words carry no weight.

Maybe I should join the military to earn my piece of the pie. After all, that is where a substantial sum of our GDP is going.