Dear Mom and Dad,

Thank you, thank you so much. And I'm sorry, so very sorry.

You know that I am grateful for the big things- feeding me, clothing me, taking care of me, raising me. You know I am eternally thankful for the years and years you spent supporting me. At least I hope you know that. But there are other things I am grateful for. Thank you for sharing your margaritas with me at dinner, for not being too mad when I told you that I never went to ACT practice. Thanks for letting too many teenagers sleep in our basement. Mom, thanks for breaking the Easter chocolate out of its hiding place early because I had a craving. Dad, thanks for letting me go to that protest and for understanding my aversion to social situations. Thanks for sitting on folding chairs with me watching drunk white people on fourth of July, thanks for listening to WGCI. Mom, thanks for remembering what its like to be a teenager and knowing how to navigate. Thanks for adjusting when the MS makes things difficult.

But also I am sorry. Really, very sorry. You are the first people I have seriously wronged, I think. I have been trying to be better lately, more honest. I am sorry for the lies I told. I am sorry for being rude and standoffish. I am sorry for every time I cursed you under my breath. I am forever sorry and ashamed of my "summer excursion" as mom calls it. I didn't know. I wish I could have kept you two safe from all the things going on with my head last year, but I think by attempting that I made it worse on everyone. I am sorry that I tried to protect you, because now I realize that it is your job to protect me. I am sorry for the future worry I am going to cause you. The next few years will be full of worry. But it will be okay, I will get through it and one day I will have a stable job and you can stop worrying a bit.

Thank you for giving me a reason to stay when I didn't want to.

Your Daughter.

Speaking Fankl-y

Logotherapy is an interested and different concept. I have never heard of it before, which I find a bit odd. I do appreciate its challenging of traditional Freudian psychotherapy, but I do not think logotherapy is the end all be all that Frankl seems to regard it as in his book. He admits that logotherapy can work in conjunction with other treatments but Frankl's writings assert very broad generalizations and seem to me to oversimplify psychological issues.

I do not think that every person has to have a meaning, or find a meaning. If a person comes to the conclusion that life is meaningless, who is Frankl to push his opinion on them? Accepting that life is meaningless does not equal giving up on life or suicide. Like the absurdists, one can believe there is no meaning without wanting to escape life. For some people no meaning is the answer, and that should be okay.

I also do not think that once a person finds their meaning that is necessarily enough. I am not a logotherapist and I do not understand the intricacies of Frankl's methods, but he seems to see finding meaning as the answer to many issues causing a person to seek therapy, including depression. I completely understand why that may be useful for some. But part of what makes Depression such an awful, debilitating disease is that a sufferer can logically understand and see the meaning in life, all the beauty and all the joy, but still be Depressed. One's outlook on life is not always in harmony with their mental state. Frankl seems to be ignoring the biological influences of mental illness.

I really do appreciate and see the merit in logotherapy and Man's Search for Meaning but I feel like we didn't challenge Frankl enough in class so I wanted to take the time to do it here.

The Meaning of Life.

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/17/george-lucas-meaning-of-life/
This link is to some excerpts on George Lucas's take on the meaning of life.


"The only reason for life is life. There is no why. We are. Life is beyond reason."

I agree with Lucas immensely. There is no meaning to life because life is meaning.  We cannot have meaning without life and we cannot have life without meaning. Life gives us meaning and that is good, that is okay. I am by no means saying that we should stop discussing the meaning of life, though. I think we would loose a lot if we just accepted that we could never figure it out. Part of life is trying, in vain, to figure it out. The meaning of life is to attempt to find meaning in it. So let's keep going, let's try to figure life out. It's totally futile but trying to find answers is what makes life worth living. It's scary because we can't assign meaning to everything, but we can figure some things out. We can choose to assign our own meaning to things when we feel it's necessary.

"If we have a meaningful place in this process, it is to try to fit into a healthy, symbiotic relationship with other life force. Everybody, ultimately, is trying to reach a harmony with the other parts of the life force. And in trying to figure out what life is all about, we ultimately come down to expressions of compassion and love, helping the rest of the life force, caring about others without any conditions or expectations, without expecting to get anything in return."

Once again, good ole George hit it right on the head. We should constantly be striving for a more loving and harmonious state. That is a huge undertaking, what more meaning do you need?

Thankful for a classmate (Emily Hawkins is the Bomb)

My blog topic is inspired by the the response I wrote to this prompt FRESHMAN YEAR for McCarthy's American Lit class. Emily and I were in that class together and I wrote about being thankful for her Freshman year so I feel like I have to Senior year as well. Not that I didn't want to.
Anyways if you wanna read my FRESHMAN YEAR post http://emilyismyhorcrux.blogspot.com/2011/11/thankfulness-emily-hawkins-is-bomb.html

Dear Emily, (this is how the OG post starts)

Thanks for being in my philosophy class. Even though you're leaving next semester to be a physical trainer for senior experience. Its whatever. I'm not mad about it. I'm really glad that I can still look at you in class and read your mind. (Didn't you sit behind me Freshman year also?) We were really mean then and we're even meaner now. I like it.

"I love the way you smell." That is a quote from my FRESHMAN YEAR blog post. So most of all I am thankful that we are not like our Freshman year selves. I'm really glad we grew and changed together and are even better friends now. I'm glad we still like nerdy things but its not the only thing we talk about anymore. I am thankful that we are still friends even though Freshman year was awful and we thought we were really cool but actually we were super lame. It makes me worry that I'm even lamer now then I realize.

"I am thankful you're alive and tolerate me"
-Gianna Clark, 2011

We still haven't figured this out yet!

I recognize that white men killing black are not the only murders that occur. I don't expect us to have eradicated murder, but I would have hoped that by now we could have stopped killing each other over skin color.

We still haven't figured out that a white man should not kill a black man. I can't list one victim without listing them all, so I'm not going to. Black people are senselessly being murdered because they are perceived as a threat based on their skin color. Racism is a huge issue and the civil rights movement was not all that long ago, it takes awhile for society to change- I get that. What I am appalled by is that we haven't figured out that every black man does not want to kill you, or rob you, or threaten you. Your hand should not twitch towards your holster when you see a hoodie. It's not just rogue red necks, it's our law enforcement. Men and women that are put in a position of power in order to keep us safe are instead making rash decisions based on fear and killing our children. A police officer should be the last person making snap judgement based on race- they should know enough, have seen enough. We should not have to wake up to another black man senselessly slaughtered.

Hate is so dangerous. Hate grows and festers until it is a part of you, until it is causing you to kill. We cannot let hate get that far.

Murder is a huge issue- I get that. Racism is a huge issue- I get that. But murdering someone you don't even know because of their skin- that's a huge issue that I expect us to solve.

I should not be begging white men not to kill black men in 2014, but I am.

How Do I Know What I Know?

How do I know what I know? I don't. Not really. Seriously though, I don't know much of anything. I think things and I feel things, but to me that doesn't equal real knowing. The closest I get is being pretty sure I know something. Like I'm pretty sure I know how to spell the word know but I can't really prove that I actually know how. It's entirely possible that I'm completely deluded and I'm just typing gibberish- or not typing at all. I can't prove that I'm not a little blob of slush with a crazy imagination that's just inventing everything I'm perceiving. But going through life constantly considering that I might not even be a person and that everything around me is a lie is not an okay for my mental health (at least I think I know that?), so I try to just assume that I am a person but remember that there are very few things I can actually prove.

Anyways, lets say that I do actually know some things. Most things I know because I have been told it by someone else and I have observed it for myself. Like I know that sometimes when people are angry they take that anger out on other people that are not at all related to why they are angry. This is a commonly accepted "fact" and I've been reminded of this since I was a kid but I have also seen people exhibit this behavior, so I have accepted it as a truth. An important part of knowledge is choosing what and when to accept something as a truth. A lot of people accept truths when they just hear it from reliable sources, but I think its important to make a conscious decision to accept something as a truth rather than not consider its validity.

Knowledge is a really, really hard thing to define and claim. I'm pretty skeptical of anyone that thinks knowledge is a certainty.

The Garden State

A garden is a happy place. A green, and warm place. A place teeming with life and possibility. Gardens take work and love and patience. You have to be willing to get your hands dirty, to spend hours hunched over in the hot sun. There is a particular pleasure that comes from having a garden. There's a beautiful harmony that comes from coaxing nature to do its thing in precisely the spot and way that you want it to.

A garden state should be simple yet interesting. It should take earnest work and diligent upkeep. A garden state can't grow amongst corruption, so it has to be WEEDED out. Yeah, I went there. But seriously- corruption and greed eats away at society. It may be natural but we have to keep it from growing out of control so that the beautiful and bountiful can thrive. A garden state should be small and thus easy to manage. The tending of the garden state should be done so that the state can grow as healthily as possible. Despite all of this hard work being done by the gardener, most of the work is being done by the garden. The plants are working hard to grow, while the gardener helps the plants along with a little water and a little weeding.

The garden metaphor doesn't work out with every detail- like the gardener just gets to rob the garden of all its tomatoes and basil and whatnot. That's not cool. And does the state just kinda die and whither in the winter? I dunno maybe the garden is some place snow doesn't exist. Still, it's a pretty cool metaphor. It conjures up images of a neat, happy little place where hard work and patience is rewarded.

Bye, Candide.