august

#213 August 1.

From: chawla@wam.umd.edu (Jay Paul Chawla)
Subject: Alt.angst Frequently Asked Questions, revision 1/18/92

Q) Today I met ...

A) She's taking advantage of you, she hates you, she's evil, and she will ruin your life.

#214 August 2.

As far as I'm concerned, heroism is the poetic component of taking such a risk. Your allusion to game theory is correct, but to me it's like saying "A flower is not a thing of beauty; it's a mechanism selected because it attracts pollinating insects." If I accept the premise that heroism applies to any sort of human behavior, then I am willing to apply it to the Haitian refugees. In relative terms, anyway, each and every one of them is more heroic than I've ever been.

My point is simply that I do not consider rational analysis sufficient in the treatment of moral or esthetic issues.

It's far too easy to use abstract analysis as a way to avoid confronting moral issues. My reaction is visceral.

-Paul Callahan

#215 August 3.

> ...

Jesus Fuck, either that took you two days to type or you can do 30,000 words a minute. That Liz chick was thanking you "for being you" because to her that means that you're so nice and gullible that you'll take care of her while she's "snogging" with some bozo she just picked up. In the back of YOUR CAR no less! You should have killed them both on the spot, or at least made her find her own ride home.

When _I_ have had that "thanks for being you" line used on ME, it's meant "I know you're romantically interested in me, but you're such a puffball that you'll let me walk all over you and just come back for more". If you want to be treated like a human being then drop her now. If Liz really wanted you she'd have been "snogging" with YOU the day you met her; since you're not, then she won't see you as a romantic interest. Get away from her before you're forced to hear about how badly her relationship with the bogan is going.

-Eric Murray

#216 August 4.

> Anyway, one day, it seemed, she decided not to talk to me,
> ever again. No explanation, no nothing. I called, even sent a letter, all
> to no avail. Now, I can handle a "no", or an "I don't think we should
> see each other," and yes, even an LJBF, but NOT a situation with NO
> FEEDBACK. This ego wound festered for weeks,

This has happened to me several times, and every goddamn time it does I just turn in on myself and the angst festers into a horrendous sore and gives me indigestion and shaking hands and the wander-the-streets-late-at-night syndrome characteristic of mid- to late-adolescent males.

-Hobbes

#217 August 5.

> [...] i'm bitchy as hell, probably because the room spins when i
> move my head too fast

Well, that's to be expected, it's all a joke, reality I mean, it's not very versatile and it doesn't react very quickly, 1000 lines of C code on a Commodore 64, if you try to look at too much at once it all starts to flicker. So if you were wondering whether there can be anything more in life than just the same stuff over and over, well no there can't, that's all there is to it, sorry, maybe the next version will be better that way.

Besides, we don't like it if you stress the illusions we've made for you, stick to the standard demos, we're sure we've worked them out properly.

> and i still feel somewhat as if large people with even
> larger sticks have been beating on me.

See what I mean? But anyway, it hasn't been debugged very well, if you do anything strange it might all malfunction or even hang.

-Jay Paul Chawla

#218 August 6.

> most people agree that angst is what you feel in response to the
> realization that life sucks and really doesn't have any great design
> behind it. people write here about the echoes of this futility in their
> lives, about the pain of fighting this void, about why and how they
> manage to find (or create) meaning in their lives anyway.

I'd include that feeling of helplessness when you think you've figured life out, you're content with your current existence/life pattern/failure rate/car/job/attempts to change/whatever, and you appear to be acting under your own volition when *WHAM!* something from COMPLETELY out of the blue wriggles in, yells "Boo!" and screws up all of your ideas about why things happen the way they do.

Mother Nature DOES play dice with the Universe. Sadly, they're loaded.

-have clue, will travel

#219 August 7.

> If there were a God, then he would just destroy everything now and
> get it over with

You are god. You can destroy everything now and get it over with, and it will only take one bullet. You have my blessing.

-Scott Hanson

This has been a recording.

#220 August 8.

I had a work dream and alt.angst dream in one yesterday, a well-packaged, merchandisable dream, so of course I have to tell everyone about it. It had a nice obvious moral that I will ignore, which in part was "don't tell them all about it." But dreaming about work makes me want to sing with joy: Hymn #507, "Snap me into place and turn me in circles forever, God, I'm happy to be a cog."

In the dream, I start in the front yard of this hotel, and I repeatedly fuck up, I don't remember how. Somehow fucking up equals ending up further and further back in the yard, and the part of the yard is physically identical to the paper I'm creating life-graphs on; unfortunately the graph keeps straying below the bottom of the paper so I keep having to start over while displaying lower and lower ranges of the life-quality-axis. But I fix the problem once and for all by making sure the life-quality-axis goes all the way to the back fence, where the dumpster is; I end up right in the dumpster but at least I have my nice neat graph of it, The End.

-Eric Boesch

#221 August 9.

> Wow. I've never really thought about it this way, but y'know, it
> really does seem to work out that way. Either it's obvious very
> early on that there's going to be boinking action / intimacy, or
> it ends up in a months-long quest with little reward and ultimately
> ends in failure.

But of course, every relationship I was in prior to discovering that rule fit it, and none of the relationships I've been in since I discovered it have fit.

There's probably another rule in that, but I don't want to find it.

-Eric Murray

#222 August 10.

We are signing the final divorce decree tomorrow.

tick.. tick.. tick..

There's not a damn thing in the world to do about it.

tick.. tick.. tick..

Did you ever feel like you were watching your life end in slow motion?

tick.. tick.. tick..

-steve

#223 August 11.

I've given up drugs and drinking so I can study (and hopefully pass) my orals. Now that I'm straight and sober all the time, I've re-realized how much my life sucks. No hobbies, no girlfriends, good at nothing but school & pool. And if anyone mentions the latter as some sort of silver lining: Fuck Off. I miss my self-inflicted hazy perceptions.

-Matt Hopkins 

             "Admit Nothing.  Blame Everyone.  Be Bitter."

#224 August 12.

i mean, in theory, i have almost everything you could want: a job that pays enough to live on but doesn't take up too much of my time, creative projects that intrigue me, amusing housemates who keep domestic life from being too lonely or dull, friends all over the place (real-life and virtual), stuff to do on weekends, dates every now and then, occasional experiments with mind-altering chemicals, books to read, a diet that's working really well... if you described my life to me, i'd think "wow, cool, sounds fun."

but it all tastes distant, like it's something i'm reading about in the paper, not something i'm living. except for periodic flashes of intensity (that usually don't last more than a few hours at best), the day-to-day reality of meness is *boring*. i get up, check in on the net, go to work, go home, eat dinner, go to sleep. trundle, trundle, the freedom ball rolls across a few more inches of floorboard before i collapse into sleep. and sleeping's just so i'll have the energy to push the ball a tiny bit further the next day. but where am i going with this? what's the point? is there any reason to keep moving? if i keep it going for a few more days, it'll be friday and i can get vaguely intoxicated and go let music flow through me like a shower and everything will feel deeply meaningful for three hours. then i'll go home and go to sleep again. i don't even think having a permanent lover would change much; it would just make things inside my hamster ball all that more crowded.

-sine

#225 August 13.

This is the age old question, 'Is there any purpose or meaning to this existence ?' to which we on alt.angst have come to resounding conclusion that the answer is a fat 'No'. It keeps you comfortable and vaguely amused and prevents you from getting too bored, but the weeks and the months fly by and your life is passing and before you know it all the years are gone and you look back and think 'What did I do in my life ?', 'Where did all those years go ?'. The answer being that you were just another average person living an average life, no point, no purpose, just because.

So, I believe that one should at least attempt to avoid the average, because the world is full of 'average people' and it doesn't need anymore. Of course this is not so easy in a world designed and constructed in such a way as to channel you into average sort of behaviour. Also you put your comfortable life style at risk and if things go wrong you likely-as-not will wish you could go back to your 'average' life.

But I for one MUST do something. I'm terrified that I will wake up one day and twenty years will have passed and I will be still in the same town, doing the same sort of job etc etc. I don't yet know how or when or what, but something.

-Alex Bienek

#226 August 14.

	so tired that i couldn't even sleep
	so many secrets i couldn't keep
	promised myself i wouldn't weep
	one more promise i couldn't keep
	it seems no one can help me now
	i'm in too deep there's no way out
	this time i have really led myself astray
	runaway train never coming back
	wrong way on a one-way track
	seems like i should be getting somewhere
	somehow i'm neither here nor there

-soul asylum

#227 August 15.

On the crisis line that I worked with for 5+ years, about half of our "chronics" were wankers... The other half seemed mainly to depend on the crisis line as a means of reaffirming their own existence, mainly by trying to get some sort of reaction out of us. This usually took the form of threatening to take their own lives or, occasionally, the lives of others. Quite often, these people were very dismayed that (a) we took their suicidal/homicidal threats seriously, or that (b) we had come to realize that they were crying wolf. Enough exposure to this type, and the idealistic volunteer is back to square one, or square -1, even.

-Tom Dennis

feeling "real" is a random occurrence in my life.

#228 August 16.

I recently discovered that whenever I whined/complained/lamented about my life, I was always presented with a bunch of strong advice, like commit myself to Siddha yoga, volunteer, meditate, take a vacation, visit the parents, extension classes, etc.

At first I was terribly impressed with the people who fervently believed in something and wished that I could have the same kind of faith which would essentially answer all questions and provide me with a purpose and plenty of activities and service, maybe even a SO.

But that isn't who I am and so it never works. I think it's natural to question one's purpose. Actually there is no purpose. Even people doing terribly dramatic things can always find someone who's beat them to do something even more dramatic. My personal insight is that there's nothing I can physically _do_ to make my life this great "thing."

Supposedly things should be like this or that if it's really good (according to society), but that has never proved to be true.

-Karen Ronan

#229 August 17.

From the alt.angst FAQ by Erik Radmall

Other than that, you can use the rule of thumb that states "If it feels bad, post it." Chicken Little is an excellent example of someone who should have posted to this group. Here, the sky is always falling. Our world is in constant crisis with spectres of war, famines and starvation, poverty, abuse of the environment, racism and bigotry, corrupt leaders, religious zealotry, fear of death, and soured personal relationships, not to mention the biggies, like "what is life all about, anyway?" This should leave no shortage of "angstogens" for your personal angst mill.

We all embrace angst here. It is what defines our existence. After all, what use would life be if everything was easy and there was nothing to worry about? Angst is a necessary element in the growth and development of any human being. It is what builds character. It provides contrast and depth to the human experience. In fact, it is so important that people without any *real* forms of angst often create it. Diseases like hypochondria, some forms of depression, and a host of other "ailments" are all indicative of someone suffering from a low angst level.

#230 August 18.

Wait! Listen to me! I understand! I realize I've waxed a bit obtuse, but it's not all that incoimprehensilbe! I jsut forgot where I was for a minute. I'm not trying to preach or entertain myself or anything, just trying to identify. Which is hard. Cause it all evaporated.

There's no cure. It's not here. It's either just soothing myself for a while or moving to a more comfortable position. it's better though. I should like to think that I have traded something for peace. I don't remember what it was. Authenti

oh this is silly. it's like this: i hated certain things about my life. there was an emptiness, a feeling that i was not quite happy. there was also a feeling that I was somehow different because of my hatred for my situation. that i could somehowkeep above it all because i knew what was _really_ going on. how stupid. it's all really really stupid stuff like not wanting to endanger my melancholy.. i know no one like being unhappy. but sometimes it's because they know... they think that there's no hope. yeah, that's it. this inuitive _knowing_ that judgment has already been rendered. but it's just a choice. not a simple one or a selfevident one, but it is. oh i know you dont believe me. after all, emotion doesn't work, reason doesn't work, why should volition? vagueness as a defense. i can smile at the snow now, and go outside and play in it. rather than let it eerily haunt the windows. that's the punctuation mark of my irisless buddhaspace: i can smile at the snow.

-Nick Lopez

#231 August 19.

I have nothing against society instilling certain values. In fact, it's as outrageous to expect a child to develop ethical principles from scratch as it is to expect them to, say, reinvent the concept of written language. Life is too short to rediscover everything. But what I don't like is the particular value (or lack thereof) that seems most prevalent, which is that you shouldn't try to find consistency in actions and beliefs. In fact, many people become positively insulted when you point out (however politely) that their beliefs are inconsistent with their actions or their other beliefs. They'd rather not know. My values are inconsistent, but I consider it a *good* thing to be made aware of this fact--no, *not* a pleasant thing.

I just think that rather than instilling values, the typical process of childhood encourages people to give lip-service to values, and then do whatever they can get away with.

-Paul Callahan

#232 August 20.

A story:

I'm not sure if I included this in the original post, but I don't exactly have much experience with women; truth be told, I've never had a real girlfriend before. So once again, while on some intellectual level I can accept "She may LBJF you, and things may get a little weird for a while", etc, some conscious level won't allow me to accept that possibility -- it's always looking at the worst-case scenario and passing it off as the most likely case...
[...]
Re: "Honesty is not perverse." I _do_ trust her. I would trust her with my _life_. And the fact that I'm hiding this from her is tearing me apart from inside. You claim that I _must_ tell her, but you provide little assurance to my soul that in the end, things will not end up worse than they are now...
[...]
I called her about two hours ago, did my best to explain the situation to her, and promptly got LJBFed. We then proceeded to spend half an hour talking about why I'm so fucked up. I finally hung up, and went out for a long walk, which ended here at the computer lab...

#233 August 21.

Do these people realize what *I* see when I look at them? I don't think so. It's one thing to not care what people think, it's another to be ignorant. There's this sense that the world is just a big hat store and these people busy themselves all day long trying on hats. It would never occur to them not to like hats. Boy, I'm starting to really lose it here. Ok, here it is--It's this lack of awareness that leads to conformity, and that's where my problem is. It *kills* me to look at people constantly who aren't in touch with themselves, they're just doing what they think is the norm. FUCK HATS!!!

-Mark Goldstein

#234 August 22.

I despise my job and have no respect for the people I work with, yet I feel panic when I think about losing the salary, health benefits, use of phone, laser printer, Xerox, etc. Then I feel guilty for being a weasel. Then I feel resentful because even in weasel mode, I operate more efficiently than 99 percent of my fellow employees, and produce better results (top management's assessment, not entirely mine). Then I feel guilty and loser-like because I didn't go for a better company in the field when job hunting six years ago. Nobody there has an inkling that I hate them, only because everything functions more smoothly when you don't give people a reason to hate you in return. Then I feel hypocritical. My wife asked whether I was OK when she heard me, again this morning, chanting "I quit... I quit..... I quit...." in the shower. I didn't even know I was doing it.

-Trapped

#235 August 23.

Hey...nobody ever said the media and corporate ConsumerHoliday planning commission ever had to be fair. *You're* just feeling that way because *you* don't fit in. If you bought everything we told you to and did everything we said, you'd have young just-barely-postpubescent babes crawling all over you.

-Stephen Okay

#236 August 24.

I prefer thin (wo)men over fat women
I prefer smart (wo)men over stupid women
I prefer rich (wo)men over poor women
I prefer healthy (wo)men over sick women
I prefer pretty (wo)men over ugly women
I prefer funny (wo)men over boring women

-A consumer quoting Don Husby

When considering candidates for possible male-female types of relationships, I tend to choose those that I find attractive based upon several criterion. I simply do not pursue this type of relationship with women who I find unattractive since, i presume it would not be good for either of us. I'm willing to explore the possibility that I'm evil, or unenlightened, for thinking this way.

-Don Husby

#237 August 25.

> the way to start a relationship is to focus on who someone else *is*
> instead of what you think they can do for you.

That sounds really neat, but it's like saying "the way to pass an exam is to focus on the important parts of the subject". It sounds nice but it doesn't help you at all. I guess the right word is contentfree.

There are plenty of other thing in sine's posting that I would like to comment on but this should be enough to serve as basis for some misunderstandings.

-Jesper Lauridsen

alt.angst sounds a lot better than alt.pathetic.losers

#238 August 26.

Depression runs deep in the souls of many who read life and know its purposelessness. Yet these are among the most powerful and dangerous of all people, for they hold in their own hands the worth of their lives, and create it with every breath.

-Curious Of All Natures

#239 August 27.

Some rainy winter Sundays when there's a little boredom, you should always carry a gun. Not to shoot yourself, but to know exactly that you're always making a choice.

-Lina Wertmuller

#240 August 28.

Four years ago I'd wondered how I could take much more of this. I figured that at some point, being an utter failure must become easier to deal with, because I felt I couldn't stand much more, but people have done it without putting their heads in vises and turning. Well, it looks like I was part right. I couldn't stand much more of it. My spirit's crushed and I've gone neurotic.

-Captain Stability

#241 August 29.

In movies, courage is rewarded; if people screw up their courage, then no matter what else happens, they're Better People For It. Really, if courage earns a tangible reward then fine but if it fails it may be good it may be bad but I think usually nothing happens "wisdom" is so often irrelevant you think what you want but afterward your mood reflects your situation and your emotions, that's all, your beliefs are just a footnote your mind goes blank for an instant one day and you realize you feel almost exactly as you did two years ago and even if in a similar situation three years ago or one year ago you did it right it doesn't matter this time you're going to do it wrong because you have learned nothing that means anything. You can search your wisdom for solutions, manipulate your little mental self-image forward and backward in time, give your little self-image advice and try to make it succeed. So finally the little self-image is sitting there triumphant at the top of the hill, and you are almost as content as if it were really you who had succeeded. But when it is really you who must do it, you find that the self-image was inaccurate because you can't simultaneously remember all the ways you can be ornery. Or after reaching the top of the hill you see that while you were busy succeeding on one front, you forgot and overstepped ten other self-imposed boundaries, and your "success" was just another in a rotating set of failures.

-Captain Stability

#242 August 30.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

-C. S. Lewis

#243 August 31.

Tears, idle tears,
I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair,
Rise in the heart and gather in the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

-Alfred, Lord Tennyson

september

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