Stumbling Toward God?

When I was young I frequently played games with a cousin who won at pretty much everything. It was very frustrating. The only game I could even sometimes win was “Sorry!”, presumably because there is a high element of chance involved.

As an adult, I found others who like games. It started casually, but as the group evolved and gravitated more toward heavy strategy games, there was one person who would win every time. Again I was frustrated. Eventually, he moved away, and while I would not say that I was happy to see a friend go… there was a shameful part of me that was relieved.

However, in his absence, I started to notice something. I win a lot. Certainly not every time, but I probably do win more often than not. I worry that others are developing the same frustration toward me that I used to feel.

Last weekend, some friends organized a tournament for a certain strategy card game. Along with a few people that I often see at game nights, there were a few people that I had not seen for several years and several that I had never met before. It made me think seriously about the person that I was, the person that I am, and the person that I really ought to have been by this point in life. It has been on my mind lately anyway, but it was really intensified in that environment.

There was also someone there who surprised me by quickly discerning that I was not a trustworthy person. That was painful, because it is an issue with which I struggle. At one point, she accused me of “playing games”, which I defended with, “It’s a game tournament. We’re ALL playing a game!” But she had stated that I was playing plural games. Of course I was.

Let me show you how easy it is to be deceitful. As I mentioned, there were a lot of people at this event who did not necessarily know each other. I was invited, because I am friends with one of the organizers. When asked how I know him, I reply that we were in a Bible study together. Simple question, simple answer, and it is 100% true. The problem is that person now knows basically one thing about me, and that one thing implies that I am a committed Christian; which I am not. Of course I could have answered, “Bible Study… but whoa now, JUST SO WE’RE CLEAR: I do not do or believe any of that stuff anymore.” I do not see that happening. Aside from being none of their business, it seems unnecessarily antagonistic in a room filled mostly, if not entirely, with Christians.

Then later, if someone wants to talk about christiany things… I was active in the church for a long time, and I even worked in ministry for about a year and a half. I have opinions on christiany things. Again it would be nice if I would preface my comments with, “I don’t actually believe the Bible, but if I did…” I do not lie out of malice. I say a lot of things that are not true as a joke, which people might not always realize. But I also say misleading things just to fit in. I am not proud of that. I spent so many years role-playing christian that even now I slip right back into it without even thinking.

I won the tournament by the way. I gave away the prize and I went home thoroughly disgusted with myself on multiple levels.

Last summer, I had the opportunity to meet the fiancée of one of my ex-girlfriends. I expect that such situations are weird for everybody. It actually was not that awkward; at least, no more awkward than when I meet anyone else for the first time. My relationship with that ex was a long time ago, and our lives have gone in *very* different directions since then, so it is not as though I was harboring a secret desire that we might get back together some day. (Which I realize is probably something that people say whether it is true or not, so you will just have to take my word for it.)

However, what was disappointing is that, perhaps uniquely among my close friends, not only am I single, but none of my ex-girlfriends are married either. So until now, I could always fall back on the comforting, “It’s not me, it’s THEM.” So, just to be clear, it is your position that the fact that you are only attracted to independent women who do not want to be tied down is in no way your fault? Oh. Well, when you put it that way…

Besides, whatever happened in the past, it “is me” now, because I do not date. At one point, I realized that the amount of time that had passed since my last relationship exceeded the total length of all of my relationships combined. And it has been another two years since that realization. My father was widowed and remarried in less time.

I also can not help but notice that several of my friends are not having much more success than I am on the serious relationship front, and I take comfort that I at least have spent very little thought, and no effort whatsoever for the same result. Although, it occasionally comes out that someone actually has been dating, but just never felt the need to tell me.

I have a stack of reasons for why I do not date that I might give depending on my mood and to whom I may be speaking. I once tried to change my relationship status on FB to ” ‘It’s complicated’ with ‘Vow of Celibacy’.” However, since “Vow of Celibacy” was not on my friend list, it only showed up on my profile as “It’s complicated”, which I think has completely the opposite connotation from what I intended.

I never actually made a formal vow of celibacy, of course. However, in honor of Valentine’s Day, I thought I would list my reasons for not dating. In no particular order:

• As I have stated previously, it became clear to me that my desire for a romantic relationship was hindering my search for God. Yet my desire for a romantic relationship was the very reason for my search for God. Unable to resolve this paradox, I essentially gave up the pursuit of either.
• I am particularly against casual dating, because I still believe in courtship. That is, dating specifically with the intention of marriage. The concept was my introduction to Christianity. I sometimes think it foolish that I should continue to hold on to that when I have largely abandoned all other religious convictions, but it is LIFO I guess.
• If I were a convinced Christian, I would obviously want to be with a Christian woman. Whereas if I were an atheist, I would prefer someone with similar views. However, being stuck in limbo for as long as I have makes such a choice impossible. To be honest, I rather prefer someone with Christian values, which seems especially unfair if I do not actually have them myself.
• I tend to be attracted to someone unattainable. She might be way out of my league, or simply not interested. Or, though it may come as a surprise that I actually have a moral code, there are circumstances where the context in which I know someone means that pursuing a romantic relationship is simply out of the question.
• It has been many years since I have even met anyone that I was seriously interested in pursuing. Now, I am obviously not some kind of Zen master. I certainly encounter intriguing females now and then. But after this many years, I have become rather adept at telling myself, “Is there any chance that you going to ask her out, talk to her, or really even think about her ever again? No? Move along then.”
• I can not help but think that if a woman gets to be my age and still is not married, there is probably a good reason for that. Of course, someone could say the same about me. They would be absolutely correct.
• I honestly do not feel that I have a lot to offer an eligible lady. I do not currently have any female friends who talk to me about relationship matters, but if I hypothetically did, and she told me about some new guy she was interested in and described someone with my lifestyle and habits? I would advice her to run for the hills. Or if I tried to do an online dating profile what would I say? “College degree that I don’t use. No real job. Live alone in a house owned by my father. Enjoys not leaving the house and never doing anything productive.” I can’t imagine that I would want to be with someone who had such low standards. I have a lot of issues that I need to work out before I could be in anything resembling a healthy relationship. The catch is, without anyone special in my life, I do not have any pressing need to work through those issues.

I have probably forgotten something. In any case, I would probably throw out every one of those reasons for a girl with the right smile, but that smile is just so very hard to come by.

In my previous post, I tangentially mentioned that I sometimes think of story ideas, but never write them down. It occurred to me afterward that someone out there (and you know who you are) might insist that I should write and make available these stories. This is actually a minor subset of “projects that I could be working on, but I’m not”, which is a much greater issue. But since I already brought it up, I will discuss this specifically

The thing is, I do not usually come up with STORIES, I come up with story IDEAS. I have think of premises for stories, not the story itself. A premise asks a question: “What would happen if…?” The story is the answer: It tells what would happen.

For example, many years ago I had an idea for a story called Holiday Ten. The idea was this: There are ten* federal holidays in the United States. Yet take, for example, Columbus Day. I realize that some people do take all the holidays seriously, and that around that particular holiday, certain types of people want to argue over whether Columbus really should be honored. Yet aside from that, and perhaps store promotions and such, I expect that most people do not give more than a passing thought to Christopher Columbus. They just take their three day weekend. In the UK, they actually have what are called Bank Holidays. It is just a day where the banks are closed and most people have the day off. Not in honor of anything, just because.

So imagine that a hundred years or so in the future, no one cares what anymore about what ANY of the holidays were intended to celebrate, they just welcome the extra day off. Having lost all original meaning, the holidays are simply referred to by number.

I further noted that, rather than our current calender, the 365 day year could be divided into 13 months of 28 days (4 weeks) with one day left over. That day would not belong to any month and would mark the start of a new year. Holiday One, if you will. Though I came up with this entirely on my own, I recognize that it is basically a lunar calendar, but I never bothered to research how it compares to the lunar calendars that other cultures have used for millennia. I also did not have a specific plan for leap years.

In any case, as indicated, my story would take place on Holiday Ten, previously known as Christmas. And when I say “take place”… I am pretty much out. What takes place? I have no idea. No plot, no characters, nothing. I actually came up with the idea several years before I ever started going to church, so it is not as though I even intended it to be preachy about the “true meaning of Christmas” or anything like that, although it is hard to imagine where else one might go with it.

So if any aspiring authors out there want to run with that, be my guest. Let me know what you come up with, and if you happen to write a multinational bestseller, please mention my blog on your book tour.

I did get a little bit further than that on this more recent story that I mentioned last week. I had an idea that I found intriguing. It felt like it would work best as a movie or graphic novel. Perhaps as webcomic since I enjoy those so much. I would like to do webcomic** sometime, however, I have had several ideas in that vein already, and if I ever did decide to formally begin one, this particular story would not be first in line. No, the best thing for this would be to just write it out, post it online somewhere and move on.

So I had this idea, but needed some characters and plot. I came up with a murder mystery sort of thing. But after several days thinking about it and getting the story all worked out in my head, I realized that I what I had was basically a murder mystery with a gimmick. As a consumer of entertainment, I absolutely hate it when I see something that wastes a good premise on a mediocre story. I certainly did not want to be guilty of that myself. Especially since the more I thought about it, the more I realized there was a certain richness and depth to my original idea and I kept asking myself, are you going to explore THIS aspect? And the answer kept being, “Not really.” I wanted to include little hints to some of these things for the audience to think about and discuss, although I find it hard to believe that people are going to set up a forum to discuss my work.

Another problem is that there is a certain supernatural element for which I really need to work out the rules. Not so much explain how it might scientifically possible, because it obviously is not. Rather, if we simply accept that this does happen, under what circumstances does it occur? Who can do it? Whom does it effect? I was not being consistent about these things. Of course, one can always just say, “Ha ha, magic!” but that is sloppy.

So after an overall evaluation, I realized that with the red herrings, hints to things outside the scope of the story, intentional ambiguities, and straight-up plot holes, I had quite a mess on my hands. Off to the back burner with that.

*It turns out that there are actually eleven federal holidays. I did not realize that Inauguration Day is an actual holiday as it only happens once every four years, and even then it is only observed in Washington D.C. and surrounding areas. Ignore that one.

**The lack of any drawing ability is not as much of a hindrance to webcomic authorship as you might think. While many do have quite excellent artwork, in the case of two of my favorites, one is draw with stick figures and the other has identical artwork every day – literally the only thing that changes is the dialog. Other options for the non-artist include: photos (either taken yourself or found online), Lego or other posed toys, crude MSPaint drawings, 3D computer graphics, and if all else fails, partner with someone who CAN draw.

I had a thought once that it would be amusing for The Purple Robe to have a self-titled EP with an actual song titled The Purple Robe; another song called Self-Titled EP; a third song called Title Track; and maybe one called Eponymous or something. Hilarious. That is not what this post is about.

I used to subscribe to a certain guitar magazine that always had “clever” article titles that I actually found quite annoying. To make up an example, there might be an article called, “Another Brick in the Wall”, and you get you get all in a Pink Floyd mood, when it turns out to be an interview with some guitarist named Johnny Wall, about whom you could not possibly care. Or whatever. It drove me crazy. Yet years later, I find myself with a blog where I am constantly catching myself wanting to title my posts with the same sort of puns and references. So now it drives me crazy that I want to do that.

In any case, lately I have been thinking about titles. A lot of that is due to the fact that I have actually been changing titles after posting recently. Last month I posted one of my [not even a little] famous movie reviews, except that I inadvertently titled it as a “Music Review…” As it happens, the prior post along with the following two were actually about music, and “music” and “movie” are kind of similar words, so it was perhaps an understandable mistake. It was up for a week or two before I noticed and corrected the error, so I suppose my most diligent readers had already noticed. If not, I left the permalink unaltered as a reminder of my foolishness.

I usually have a title in mind for a post when I come up with the topic, before I even start writing. However, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote the whole post, and then sat for some time trying to think what to call it. It was another post about dreams, and the first thing I happened to think of was “Bird Singing in the Sycamore Tree”, which (assuming that you are exactly as cultured as I am) you should recognize as a reference to dreams. Yet it just was not quite my style. So I decided instead on, “Who Am I to Disagree?”, which is another similar reference, if perhaps more cryptic. I was not totally satisfied with that, but I published it anyway. However, with that finished, I still had sycamore trees on my mind, so I went back to the source for that reference and discovered the “While I’m Alone and Blue as Can Be” line (again assuming that you are exactly as cultured as I am – you did not know about either) which was definitely my style. Unfortunately, I initially misquoted it as “[When] I’m Alone…” and thus, within minutes of initially posting, I changed the title and resulting link TWICE, but I figured that no one would have seen it yet.

Last week I went overboard on the geekiness. In some programming/engineering/logic contexts, “!” means “NOT [whatever comes afterward]”. For example, if X is TRUE then !X would be FALSE. So for that particular title, You have to ask yourself, “What is Sparta?” Then more specifically, “What is NOT Sparta?” That was a lot of work, no? [What do you think of THAT, Guitar World?]

As you may have noticed, I am quite fond of titles that start “In Which the Author…”, but I try to limit those so as not to lose the novelty. Other times I get stuck on a theme. I had no initial intention of having three “([Whatever] Edition!)” music posts, or three posts related to racism, or how for a while last summer two out of every three post titles inexplicably started with the letter ‘F’. I still do not know what that was about. It got to the point where I would come up with a post and title and have to tell myself, “I don’t care how perfect that title is, it starts with ‘F’ again. Change it.”

On the topic of what to call things, sometimes I come up with story ideas. (I never, you know, write them down, or anything like that, of course.) Yet, in my head, I have to call the characters something, and I find it tricky to come up with names, because invariably I think of someone that I know or have known with that name, and I generally do not want that character to remind me of that person.

Last week, I had plenty of time to think as I was digging holes, and I came up with a new story (which is unlikely to go anywhere), and for some reason I settled on the name “Clara” for one of the characters. Then I immediately thought, What‽ No one has been named “Clara” in a hundred years. Which is obviously good for the someone-that-I-know issue, but not so great on the a-name-that-someone-would-actually-have criteria. However, this is the internet, and I discovered that after a dramatic fall off, “Clara” has actually been gaining in popularity over the last ten years. Which really left me wondering how exactly did I know that? (Incidentally, it seems that “Aiden” is among the top ten name for boys these days. Why would you name your kid that? That name screams, “Entitled punk who desperately needs to be slapped.”)

Lastly, back to the topic of post titles, how are you guys doing on this one? I even thought of another level since then that made me really wish I had attached it to a more meaningful post, but c’est la vie. Would it help if I mentioned that I had this song in my head when I first came up with it? Probably not.

I once heard on Christian radio, “You know, there’s not a single thing that you’re going through that someone hasn’t been through before.” The point being  that you should, of course, give your problems to God, but also not be afraid to seek out guidance from members of your church or whatever.

And while I generally agree with the statement, I can not imagine that anyone that I could reasonably talk to has ever had this specific problem that I was dealing with today.

It is rapidly coming up on one year since I tore apart my bathroom to fix a leak… and not fix anything else. Due to some pressure from a couple of people, I have been a little more serious for the about getting that done, and a lot more serious this past week. However, I quickly discovered that once I broke for lunch, I absolutely refused to go back in there afterward. No amount of self-berating could change that. Now, technically, that is still a big step up from refusing to go in there at all, which I did for months and months. Yet, having firmly decided that absolutely nothing is more important than getting this done, the fact that I seem to be fighting some kind of civil war with my own body when it comes time to do it is frustrating and confusing, to say the least. It is almost enough to make me believe in spiritual warfare, but I really do not want to go there.

Anyway, without going into details, today I discovered that I had screwed something up, and spent all day (with no damned lunch break) just trying to get back to the point where I was on Monday. Which basically entailed digging a hole in the bathroom floor for a fourth time. It is hard not to think of oneself as an incompetent fool during such a process. Especially when the specific thing that I am trying to do is probably not that critical. I seriously could have wasted another week looking up nonsense on the internet or whatever and been no better or worse than I am now.

Naturally, one can not help but think that I could fall on my sword and just pay someone to fix this problem. Except, at this point, I honestly do not think that I could. It would be expensive, humiliating and I strongly doubt that I would be happy with the results. A certain television show just last week mentioned that “every single contractor in the world is a miserable, incompetent thief”, which would be easier to dismiss as a joke were it not for the fact that everyone that I have ever known to hire a contractor has been dissatisfied.

This post is a little later than usual because I just clean forgot about blogging last week.

Last night I had a dream about Lady Gaga again. (To whom, as you may recall, in dreams I am somewhat related. Although I am not sure that was the case this time. I have somehow managed to learn a little more about the real life Gaga in the intervening… almost exactly two years… and this dream featured a somewhat more “realistic” version.) As it happened, the Lady was going to be on Saturday Night Live and needed to get a band together for the performance. [Does she have a band? She must have a band. Right? I don’t know.] I have no idea why I was in a position for her to be telling me all this, but so it went. The first person she found was a jovial old fellow who played bass, but in his own words, “I am 99 years old, and I am not going to live to 100.” Apparently he did not want to waste any of his remaining time on this gig. She had found two other guys to play though, but when I looked at them, I realized that it was just the Lonely Island guys in disguise.

Wait a second, I play bass. Sort of. I do not know why I did not think to mention that in the dream. Instead, since there was some doubt in my last post as to Lady Gaga’s sense of humor, I asked how the members of the band knew when she was joking.

“They never know.” She replied conspiratorially. “Just like with YOU.” Aww, she’s just like me! [Still, I think I prefer Magic Tween Gaga. (You know, maybe I should start my own line of Dream Lady Gaga action figures. (You know, maybe when ideas like that enter my head I should let them pass without mentioning them.))]

As it happened, my shoulder was hurting when I went to bed last night, and continued to hurt as I woke up several times in the night. I had another dream in and around these wakings where I was beside a swimming pool for some reason and I was making stacks of round stones about a foot in diameter and three or four inches tall. Only in the dreams they were not called “stones”, they were called “PAIN.”

I usually  exclude comedy songs from my lists, because I have a hard time taking them seriously, if you know what I mean. But some of them are actually pretty entertaining so today I figured, “Why not?”

Horse Outside – Rubberbandits Warning: Vulgar. Also: Scottish.

Perform This Way – Weird Al Yankovic Not necessarily Weird Al’s best, but interesting for the back story. Apparently, when he asked for Lady Gaga’s permission, her “people” claimed that she needed to hear it first. So he went to the trouble of recording, only to be denied, which raises the counter-intuitive proposition that Lady Gaga actually has no sense of humor. However, after he posted the song and rant online, Lady Gaga gave it her blessing. I had read somewhere that after the Coolio incident, Weird Al always contacts the artist directly precisely to avoid this kind of problem. So, was this a misunderstanding, or coordinated publicity stunt? Warning: creepy weird-ass video.

Show Me Where Your Noms At – Hannah Hart & Songs To Wear Pants To This is a collaboration between some dude of whom I had previously never heard and a girl with a terrible cooking show.  That is to say, the show is about terrible cooking wherein she (allegedly) gets drunk and attempts to do a cooking demonstration with no preparation whatsoever.

God’s Away on Business – Tom Waits/Cookie Monster Tom Waits is an artist of whom I have been vaguely aware for some time now. Earlier this year I wanted to know more about him, but he has such an intimidating body of work that it is hard to know where to start. I did quite like this one though. By some coincidence, about a month later, someone put this gem together. It is actually almost a minute longer than the official video, and unfortunately, I feel it actually suffers for the added repetitiveness, but there you go.

Stores That Tell You Exactly What They Are – Break This is a song that I declined to put on last year’s list, which is a shame, because it might have been the only one actually released in the year 2010. Other than that, I think the appeal is self explanatory.