kingtycoon | Punishing Fire & Animal Frenzy

My shiny head and the LED overheads always give me the look of having a halo. That's proper. Up for consideration today is character and strength of intention & sincerity in execution. We were walking and talking - schoolwork study and this is where I am with that:

1st - MeMyselfandI - I only eat supper. That's my move, lunch makes me sleepy & useless and there's no way to get a snack or nothing on the way to work in the morning because of how my work is in a terrible place. I only eat supper, right after work - except on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I go straight to A's mom's house to get her and take her to the library to study. Do homework. I don't bitch about this out-loud or anything but I think about it in an increasingly resentful way. I skip meals and walk miles to help you and you're not holding up your side of it! That's what I think to myself. So I got to let that go. Here's what it is - I've fallen into petty ideas about the value of self & my own worth. You're what you do and nothing more. Remember... I have to remember... It's not that these meaningless little sacrifices don't have their own value - it's that keeping score of that value is shameful. So let it go.

2nd - Worst Enemies - Who is working hardest against you? I guess it's always me, I see it in A - who is certainly her own worst enemy. "Let's work on all these assignments, let's do this thing you need to do." And her: "I... Uh... I left it at school." Forgetting and distracted. I understand - I was that kid, am that man. But I figured out to be resourceful and wise and maintain a method so I can be on top of the things I must be on top of. Most of the time. Sometimes - when I did college this last time - I'd show up and we'd be doing our discussions or readings and I'd fumble for a pen or the right book. Maybe I didn't have it that day and I'd ask for someone's help. "My lack of preparation is all of your problem." I'd say - but because I have a bombastic classroom presence & an easy charm this is taken as an unobtrusive, comic interlude. Not a burden, not a problem. You too can lean on your high charisma score. But without that- just sulking unprepared or lost - what happens? I guess you drift into daydreams and forgetfulness & boredom.

3rd - Socrates - She's learning (sortof, the textbook is rubbish, I didn't battle it directly, but I led her to think undermining thoughts about its lies) about Ancient Greece. Up comes Socrates and his famous method. We do a little talking about that- using the reductive arguments against statements of positive truth - I'm pretty good, so I argue her into the true fact that she can't really know whether or not she has fingers. That's the example. So what's important? Socrates never got a good answer about what was Justice or Virtue - but he drank the hemlock to spite his accusers because he must have had some sense of it - or to prove a point or to just be stubbornly virtuous. So is it better to be like Socrates or to live in hypocrisy. This is where the thought is- is being ardently, suicidaly stubborn actually admirable? Or really - do you show a better character by enduring life & submitting your own virtue or thought of virtue to whatever forces you must submit to in order to survive? Which is the good way and does it just seem good because it's harder? That's protestant upbringing right there: "Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” So - if things are easy or pleasant - well then, you're doing the wrong thing right? Right? I won't pretend I don't think about this very often. It's still something to me, to know that arduous, difficult things are good things and easy, amusing things are shameful.

4th - Waiting on the bus - If I stand in the rain outside the shelter by myself to smoke - does that give me a moral superiority to the people who smoke in the shelter? Or who discard their blunt tips on the ground? If I don't shout about nonsense drunkenly on the bus am I more morally upright than those who do? Am I supposed to be judging the people around me constantly and regarding them as garbage? I don't know. I don't know - I'm taken by most as an optimist because I like people and expect them to accomplish things and because I think that in groups & societies people do amazing things. But I also think that people are terrible, liars & vain liars - untrustworthy you know. I think that people will make robots and then there will be robots and that's the story of the earth. Eventually we'll make great robots and they will be great & do great things. That's my optimism, even if nobody knows really. But people act in ways that seem, must seem right(?) correct to them, but which are... I'd be ashamed if I did these things. I'd feel remorse and guilt. So am I just kidding myself? Is not being a dick a self-serving move - where I'm avoiding my own shame instead of embracing shame and guilt (since those are the harder things to do...)

5th - Demonstrations - I say - forgetting your work and doing it in a half-assed way are shameful things that show you have not developed strong character. I say - standing up and telling the teacher that you refuse to do this work and will never submit to their authority is a different way of showing strong character. I say I don't care about performance to the arbitrary standards of the teacher & the state. I say, without really saying it that I care about performance to my own arbitrary standards.

Finally, it's in the end, that we have to acknowledge as people that what we want & what is important is to see the sun shining on you while you are not hungry or afraid and to know, with good certainty where you are going to sleep tonight. I have to remember that these are the important things and that everything else is self-obsessed vanity.