ramblings

I like to chat online. I'm addicted to the idea of a transnational internet world. My body doesn't exist in this world. I am only the sum total of my writings (or the rare times I use voice or until I get a webcam). It's like astral projection but a lot less cool than that. I chat with people in Venezuela or India or China or whereever the fuck else they are. We argue. We laugh. We commiserate. We are human. It is an amazing thing to connect to someone so far away. A connection that exists beyond the mere, "Hi, how are you?"

But at the same time the anonymity of it shows the true side of people. All the things that people want to say in everyday life but are too afraid to say. All the racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, just oppressor shit. But I like to see that. Cause it never makes me forget where we are. And these are the people that have enough money to buy computers! Which goes to show that social class has nothing to do with how smart or good someone is.

The Western world likes to believe that material conditions determine people's consciousness. And to some extent that is true, as we are conditioned by our environment. But I think it's a cop-out. We are no better than people 2000 years ago. We may have more stuff and more luxury to allow us to be more civil, but we're still the same. We have the hate and love, lust and nurturing, and all the other complementary parts to our personality. There have always been the people in the world who have done the right thing. People that have lived the Dao. These transcendental actions are not bound by time or material conditions. Nowadays people help feed industries that perpetuate slavery (i.e. chocolate and coffee and such) and go about their lives not wanting to change. We abhor slavery as if it were a relic in time. I often know what is the better more moral choice yet I still take the easier more corrupt choice. Am I to believe that people in the past never felt these ways. There is nothing new under the sun. The betrayal and the altruism have always existed.

Yet I hope for people. Which must make me daft. Cause the history of humanity is a particularly bloody one. Yet I hope for the better. I guess it's one of the reasons I'm teaching. I believe that people can do better. That we are not bound like animals to our nature. That we can choose to do better and be better.

I think about my life. I was a complete asshole growing up. Angry at everyone because my parents were too busy fighting to give a shit about me. Self-destructive and nihilistic. But I worked to make myself a better person and I still am working. I still have a long way to go, but I know that I am choosing to live and be the person that I want to be. My angst lessens as I live the way my heart knows is right. I got crazy family. Angry crazy brother and father. Crazy extended family. Some pockets of sanity, but the crazy ones take up a lot of time and space. Being loved and loving back is what changed me.

That's the thing with my brother and dad. They can't love back. Loving back requires too much. To give someone your love is easy, when you get angry you can take it away. To love them back is hard. They are both too hurt and prideful and macho to really be vulnerable with someone and love them back. And I can see the pain in their pathetic states. And they try to bring others down with them. There is a sense of schadenfreude as they see others as unhappy as they are. Perhaps they are not conscious of it perhaps they are, I guess I'll never really know. But whatever the case, its not healthy for me to be around them.