Hey, family!

I know you guys read this thing. When are we all going to get together? I miss you guys. Soon, I hope? Before the reunion. Whenever that is.
ps. Sorry about the t-shirt. I'm lame. But I'm working on it, I swear. (feel free to pitch in better ideas anytime.)

I am young and still learning things, but I still complain about kids today who are so ungrateful with their rock music get off my lawn.

ALSO FEATURED TODAY: BLATANT, CONTRADICTORY HYPOCRISY on part of teenage writer served with a dire lack of perspective and proper paragraph structure! ENJOY.

Hey everybody. Sorry I haven't updated since November; I've had a million projects going on.

To freshen things up, I thought I would share a depressing(?) revelation I had recently, probably cross-posted to my other blog. You probably don't know where that is anyways so nevermind. Ha ha.

I was thinking recently about perspective, and how I always lecture people around me on whining about their miniscule everyday troubles because starving Darfuris would totally beat the crap out of these kids for being so ungrateful if they could lift their skinny little limbs and do it. Okay sorry, but you know what I mean. I know I'm a huge hypocrite here, too, but sometimes when I step back, it just makes me downright mad that anyone (including me) would ever DREAM of lamenting things like "I lost my favourite pair of shoes" (because you have multiple pairs), "My boyfriend rejected me" (because you are not self-confident and mature enough to take it like a wo/man), "I have to work over vacation", "My boss is an a**hole", "My teacher made me stay after school", et cetera et cetera.
Aside from wanting to slap everybody who says things like this and makes it out to be the ultimate suffering (which, as an unnecessary judgment and getting-upset-over-what-other-people-could-be-doing-better, naturally stems from my own personal deep-rooted arrogance and insecurity, but that's another story), I just want to make everybody understand. Yes, you got extra homework! It's extra work, but it's also extra learning. You get homework because you have free education. FREE EDUCATION. Isn't that AWESOME? Do you know how many people in the world can't read? (I don't, but it's a lot.) You should be so enthused, you do all your homework with gusto. It is not a legitimate worry.
I could go on for hours. Yada yada. It would be nice (I'm sure you're all thinking) if I could remind myself of this more often, too, for sure. I'm not very good at that but getting better.

Now the thing with the starving Africans lecture is that it sounds like I'm saying none of you have a right to complain or be sad, ever. And this might even be true, but nobody is that perfect. At any rate, you might be making the case, "Well, of course there's always SOMEONE who has it worse off than you. Doesn't mean my situation isn't bad! I have the right to vent as much as I like."
That is the thing: being sad and venting are perfectly acceptable and sometimes necessary. It is the incessant bemoaning that drives me up the wall. The whining and crying over how hard your upper-middle-class-suburban-American-Dream life is. The why-does-this-sh*t-always-happen-to-me that I hear almost every day. You're not even TRYING to feel better. You just want something to rant about.
Don't do it. You have so much to be happy about. Look at that instead. Turn that frown upside down. Count your blessings.

Listen to me, I sound like I've got it all figured out. I'm quite the philosopher, really. But I hope I was successful in saying something in there that made me look deep or insightful rather than like an idiot. Or that maybe I inspired someone to look at the positive aspects of life more often. Or maybe it was just a big confusing mass of ramble that made no sense at all.
My money's on the latter.

Anyways, this is the actual revalation I had (I will try to make sense and be quick about it):
No matter what kind of reasons or system or rationalizations you come up with, reality is cruel and harsh and never ever fair. I can pretend to care about underprivileged peoples and world issues more than you, but if you honestly felt ALL the sorrows and tragedies that happen every day in the world to innocent, undeserving people, you would explode from sadness and grief.* The most you can hope to care is "more than everybody else", and not too much so that it interferes with your own happiness and daily life. A little bit, enough to feel good about yourself, that you are a responsible and caring individual.
BUT you might take this to mean someting like

"Reality is despair. The world is rotten, all the way through. There is no good in it. Nobody really cares, so we should all just stop pretending and admit life is cruel and sucks."

That's not what I'm saying in the least! No no no.
Self-delusion is necessary for survival. You have to invent SOMETHING in your mind to prevent you from having to care about all the world's problems. It's one of those things that isn't good or bad, per se. It just is. And you pick and choose which delusions you like. Personally, I like the one about "I'm bettering the world through my artwork someday, I am pretty much OK." I also like the one about ying/yang harmony and everything being in balance. It's neat.

It is okay to only care a little, because it is better than not caring at all.

I hope somebody understood most of that. I wrote most of it while I was sleep deprived. I am done for tonight. Just remember: it helps sometimes to remember how horrible life is for so many people, because it reminds you how great your own life probably is. (I missed a bunch of points, but I'll get them later.) That is all for this morning.

* Likewise, if you only realized how truly blessed you are by contrast, you'd wake up crying with joy every day. It's a shame hardly anybody does, eh?

I took this quiz that's being spammed all over the internet to see how I would do.

HeavenEntryTest.com - Will You Make it to Heaven?
Your chances of getting into Heaven are: 57%

You lead a very balanced spiritual life.
People probably characterize you with
being a kind, sensitive giving person.
But it does not hurt to try to better yourself
in order to increase your chances of entrance to Heaven.

Because of course, the only reason we would ever want to better ourselves is to score heaven points.
Seriously, what?
(Some of the questions on the quiz are related to Bible knowledge. Does this mean people in third world countries who never learned how to read are less likely to get in? What if you look up the answers? Is that cheating?)

The following image inspired some thoughts from me.

I think it's from Livejournal, I saw it in somebody's forum signature. Anyways.
"Every time you compliment her, I hate myself just a little bit more."
It looks to be coming from the point of view of someone who is not very attractive by society's ridiculous, Barbie-doll standards, who is probably distressed because the boy of their dreams (?) admires some thinner girl instead. It is a very emotional picture and it is also very nice and artfully composed, I think.
While it's true we all strive for an image of perfection nobody can achieve and which causes many girls to develop eating disorders etc blah blah, this is also what I think. If you're sad because your boyfriend would rather be with a girl who is physically fit and attractive, why not get off the couch and get fit? Get some exercise, maybe? Stop moping around about how nobody loves you? And if you do get to a weight where you're healthy and you're happy with yourself, and he still wants somebody thinner, then hey, it's his loss. But there's no reason why you should make it look like everyone else's fault if you're too insecure with your own body to handle skinny girls getting compliments.
If you hate the way you are, do something about it. Don't sit around whining. Self-love is the ultimate goal, no matter what.
People are way too concerned with what everybody else thinks, I swear.

Oh, and to tie this up, here is a picture I found on the internets, part of the 'demotivators' meme from 4chan:

This animation (I can't link or embed it, so you'll have to go to the site and play it) was on one of the bumps on Adult Swim a while ago. I thought it was very nice and lovely.
Can anyone tell me where the music is from? I love it but I haven't got a clue. Any help at all would be appreciated.

"...Remember Lot's wife.
She was not a homosexual, but she was a sodomite... where the custom of the place was to accept homosexuality as merely an innocent, alternate lifestyle, rather than the soul-damning, life-destroying, nation-dooming sin God Almighty declares it to be. Lot's wife simply could not accept the idea that God would actually destroy an entire nation for simply being tolerant of an innocent, alternate lifestyle. That's her thinking. Her relatives, friends and neighbors were practicing fags and dykes. She knew them well. She liked them. She looked back in anxious sympathy for them. And God struck her dead, and made her corpse a pillar of salt. Remember Lot's wife."
- Pastor Fred W. Phelps, Westboro Baptist Church

also

I enjoyed this commercial as well.

Thanks everyone for wishing me a happy birthday like forever ago.