Just stay tuned for now, okay?

"I used to hate the morning.
It's because I was always so alone before.
A dead soul in a living cell.  Oh, I knew what I was...
...and hated myself for it.
One day, an angel appeared before me...
...and cracked the shell that surrounded me.
Over time, she helped to release...
...all the different sides of me.
I never even would have imagined...
...that there would have been so many 'me's...
...until the 'su girl' came into my life."
--Kotarou Higuchi, Pita-Ten 8

Why must I judge everyone, even myself?  Even myself for judging?

=====

I guess it's time to face up to everything, time to grow up.  It's easier to pretend that everything is okay, but the better thing to do is to have a bit of humility.  Or, maybe a lot of it.  Heh...

I woke up crying this morning, twice...it's always really interesting when that happens.  Crying in a dream, and waking up still crying.  I've only done it a few times before.

Differences

Why can't I just celebrate differences?

I will never be a girl.  Never.  And that's not just because I can't ever look like a girl, act like a girl, dress like a girl, even have the body of a girl.  Of course, I will never have those things either.  But those things are all superficial.  Yes, they count, but they are things that can change, things that are just...on the surface.  But my friends will never accept me as a girl.  Even if you say you would, you wouldn't =really= treat me the same way.  And even if you did, I still wouldn't be a girl then, either.  Because I won't know what it feels like to be a girl.  Even if I could magically transform, I'd still be a boy inside a girl's body.

It's funny, because I used to think I was a girl inside a boy's body.  But I'm not.  Because I'll never know what it feels like.  I didn't grow up that way.  And I'm missing all of those experiences.  Everything will all be pretend, even if I tried.

And somehow, that seems so sad.  Why?  Is it just because all of my friends are girls?  Why is it that I'm stuck on the other side?  Like I'm on the other side of a glass pane, and all I can do is watch everyone, and pretend that I'm in their world, but I will never be able to play with them.  Do other people feel this way?  I'm sure there are -girls- who feel this way too, actually.  Isn't boy supposed to be the superior race anyways?  Why is it that it feels so bad to be one?  Aren't we supposed to be more powerful, more priviledged, more successful, more everything?  Why is it that it seems like all that does is instill everyone with a sense of insecurity?  Security?  Is anyone really secure about themselves?  And if they are, wouldn't they just be seen as arrogant and conceited?

Do boys even feel a sense of kinship with each other?  It must be so sad, to be a boy.  Would I know?  I'm not sure.  I don't even know if I am one, after all.  Sometimes it feels like I got the best of both.  Other times it feels like I got nothing at all.

Why can I never be on the same side?  Did you know?  I have a new role model in my life.  That's something I haven't had since way back in my childhood, when I would look up to my brother.  But you know?  I'll never be like my role model.  How can I be, when there's such a basic difference?  I'll always be one of "them".  Why can't I celebrate differences?  What's there to love about myself?

I'll never be like you.  But you know, you'll never know what it feels like either.  Why does that seem so unfair?  Why is it that my end of the stick seems shorter?  It's not right for me to feel like that, is it?

How do you people read this code???  Ugh!

There really is no right or wrong, in how you interact with other people, and what you do, except defined by yourself.  If it's okay with you, then...well, everyone else should just take it as it is, because that's you.  But it should at least be okay with you.

Cried yesterday, a really long and hard cry.  Gosh, how far I've come...I even started to get a headache.

Why is it that I don't blog about happy things anymore?  Didn't I do that in the past?  Didn't I?  I guess it's not like there aren't happy things in my life anymore...just that they aren't things that I write about, I guess.  Maybe I feel like the daily things, the small details, are somehow just not significant anymore...they've become little fine prints that I can just encapsulate away because, well, what do you care about my day to day life anyways?

Maybe I shouldn't think that way...after all, getting in touch with someone's daily life is really neat, isn't it?

Posting is just really weird nowadays.  I think my demeanor, my behavior, my outlook, the way I see myself--those things have sort of settled down, I think.  But somehow the blogging is still totally stuck in this weird limbo phase.

Speaking of Limbo, I played through the first half of it again yesterday.  Omg...so scared...probably more so than the first time, to be honest.  I think a lot of that is because I already knew what was coming, knew what to expect.  That sense of -dread-, you know?

Whoa...suddenly getting vibes of winter...whoa...

Don't judge...don't judge...it's so hurtful.  People have so many problems with insecurity already...I already have a bad enough impression of things without it...how can I form an honest opinion on something if I feel that pressure?  Or is that just my issue, and not yours?  Maybe, I guess...

My atmosphere is changed...since when did I become so stressed out?  I used to blog whenever I had something to complain about, something to marvel about, something I was excited about, happy about, angry about.  Now I just blog with this certain -feeling- of...I don't know what, exactly, but it feels like it's dragging me down.

It's weird, isn't it?  I want to be free and chained down at the same time.

Bliss

I wonder if the sense of peace and security that I had with me last year was a false one.  Of course, many things have changed, both around myself and within myself, but, what is there that has =really= changed?  Life is ever-changing, ever-uncertain, and we are powerless against it.  Everything is ephemeral, no matter how hard you try to hang onto it.

...is it?  I think I need to half believe that, and half not believe it at the same time.  I need to accept it, because it happens, and I need to deal with it when it does.  But I need to stand up against it too, just because that's how I am.  If I truly believed that it doesn't matter how hard you hang onto things, that just invalidates everything about how I do things, doesn't it?  Why do I try so hard?

Even if it was a false sense of security, though, maybe it's better to delude myself.  It's contradictory, because I've always believed that ignorance is bliss, but at the same time always believed in honesty as well.  I guess true ignorance isn't under your own control.  Could I hide something from someone I cared about, to make them feel better?  I think that's very hard for me.  I think it's important for me to be true to others...true in that I'm showing them me--all of me.  Yes...that's important to me, and other people have commented on it as well.  That's one of the things that makes me who I am.

How else can we live, in the face of so, so, so many things, unless we simply stop thinking about them, or at least, put them to rest, so that we can focus on the things that will actually allow us to live our lives in a positive and happy way?  There are so many things.  It's too much.  Even -one- thing can be too much.  Too big.

But I wouldn't have it any other way, I guess.  Would I?

Everything

I want to start blogging more often again, I think.  The reason I say that is because it feels like too much is "swirling around" in my life these days.  Maybe blogging is a way to catch all of those threads that are spinning around in the air and settle them down on the ground again.

I'm hoping that the peace I had of yesteryear is not incompatible with the new sense of exploration and discovery that I've adopted.  That would be so disappointing!

I started playing around with pastels.  Of course, I'm still a total foreigner to the medium, but I really like it.  I like it because it makes me think of light, shading, color, things like that, as opposed to when I'm just doing lineart.  You know, whenever I think about art, I always try and relate it to music.  I think one thing that's "bad" about just going and drawing random lineart is because I feel too pressured to plan things out before I start.  I think that's why doing still life drawings is a little bit more fun.

I did http://ddrkirbyisq.deviantart.com/art/Pastel-Sketch-6-378553774 and think it's actually pretty revealing to some certain aesthetics of mine.  Maybe coincidental, of course, but some of it not, either.  One is the composition and direction.  I just like stroking from bottom left to top right, for some reason, so whenever I start doodles, that stroke direction is normally what I do.  So that direction is really common for me, for that reason.  The other thing is the light of it.  When I was comparing to music, I got the feeling that I might (?) like drawing things that are mostly dark, but with some sort of glowing light.  Imagine something like aurora borealis or something.  The reasoning behind that is because that light feels to me like the melody of a song.  For me, the melody is something that's like frosting you put on top of a cake...it's not the central part, and doesn't have that much "weight", even though it's important and is the most attention grabbing.  So if I equate that to the light, it makes sense that I'd draw something that has a thin glow of highlight.

Of course, that's all just hypothetical thinking and I could be wayyyyyy off base here.

I think pastels are also cool because I get to work with dark paper.  Starting from black and then building up light seems more natural, in some ways, than going in the other direction.  I'd like to say it's because that's how computer light works, but...that's probably just overromanticizing it.  It definitely is cooler though...and carries a bit more of a nighttime mood, which I like.

There's a turmoil in my mind that I hope I can quiet down...I hope...I hope it can quiet down...

Got my new headphones!  AKG K240 mkii's, they're pretty awesome!  Time to show them off to everyone at work and make them jealous.  My co-workers all got some random noise-cancelling headphones instead, but I was like no!  No sir, I don't want that!  No need for that...just give me my studio headphones please. :)

About relationships...I realize that for me, I don't have a need to keep all relationships the same.  That's too impractical.  But, I want to make sure that if a relationship changes, it's because the relationship "should" change.  I don't want a relationship to change for the worse, just because I didn't put in enough effort.  Taht's really what I want to avoid.  Of course, I can put in effort and the relationship could still deteriorate.  That's sad, but that's okay.  Because then it was just natural, right?  But if it fell apart because of me, and I could have done something differently, then...that's not as okay, I think...

Of course, even if a relationship naturally doesn't work, I would still find it important to remember it, to think back on it, and to still value it.  Because I affix myself to the past, and it's important to me.  Never going to give that up.

It feels like I've written so much, yet also nothing at all...

=====

I started to read Pita-Ten, since I picked up the entire set of manga at Fanime at the swap meet.  Just book 1, and already I'm pretty into it.  So many feelings...I think partially because I have more life experiences now, there are things that are just more intense for me.  That must be it, right?  It's not just that I cry more easily now, but also because I just have stronger empathy for certain situations, that they affect me so much more.  Yes...that must be it.

Looking forward to finishing it.  It was a long time ago that I watched the anime, and even that had its moments for me.  So I'm sure this will too.  Shia...haha, can't lie, every time that Shia shows up, is just...

My world is spinning...again...

I can't think of a way to say anything without sounding pretentious, somehow.  I think I'm having self-confidence issues these days.  I guess that's always been an issue, really.  Well...I guess, before, I used to be more self-confident...which is really just another way of saying that I was more arrogant and judgmental.  I think I found it so much easier to just posit my own beliefs on things, and just assume that everyone else was wrong; that my way is best and that I can scoff at anything else.  Does that seem silly?  I don't think it was exactly like that, but...in a way, it sort of was.

But of course, that's no longer valid.  How can it be, when -I- changed, when I am no longer that way anymore?  Doesn't that mean that I was wrong?  I guess not necessarily.  Maybe everything was right at the time.  Hindsight is 20/20?

Anyways, what I was =going= to write about is how much stress I've been tucking away inside of my proverbial closet.  I kind of know it's there, so it wasn't really shocking to see it all spilling out when I opened the door.  I'm not really in denial in that sense.  But I still don't really confront that too often.  I'm too careful now, too guarded.  Blogging used to be a way for me to let out all of those things.  Even if I had to use cryptic terms, like "he-who-shall-not-be-named", I still got to at least do =something= with all of the things that pissed me off, all of the things that made me upset, worried, stressed, anxious, all of the things that made me feel bad about myself, the things that made me angry and the things that made me angry that I was angry at them.  To at least acknowledge that those things were real, and that they bothered me--even if it seems more immature, wasn't that a healthier way?

In the end, who is going to judge me for spewing all of those things out?  Hmm...but as I flip the situation around, maybe that isn't such a rhetorical question after all.  I judge too, after all.

Project Love Everlasting: ~82% complete.

Even as I change...even as I change myself, I cannot, and should not, ever deny who I am.  Because there is a reason I am this way...I never do something without a reason, I never do things that I don't believe in.

Some things have to change

Hey there, everyone.

It looks like we're officially moving here, and Blogger is our new home.  For those of you who are just joining now, the home for this blog up until now has always been http://ddrkirbyisq.xanga.com/.  Actually, before that, it was http://www.xanga.com/ddrkirbyisq, which now just gives you a redirect.

My first post on Xanga was made on Wednesday, September 15, 2004, and was titled "Starcraft bogus rant 1: Overmind Broodlings".  That was just a copy-paste dump of a completely random conversation I had on AIM with a friend of me spewing out nonsense that I made up about non-existant Starcraft units.  That was about 9 years ago.  Nine =years=!  I've been blogging for this entire time, pretty regularly (though my frequency has slipped a little bit in recent days).  I've been writing, writing, just typing out my thoughts on anything and everything, all throughout high school and college.  They always say those are the most transformative years of your life, don't they?  I certainly changed a lot...

If I had things my way, I would probably just stay there on Xanga.  Why?  Because I don't really care about being hipster or whether I'm behind the times, or anything.  Xanga has always done what I've needed it to, and there's no reason for me to move, no reason for me to leave all of my past and history behind.  I don't like change, and more than that, I value consistency.  I take pride in being the one that stayed behind and kept on writing about my life.  Because I don't do things that I don't see value in.  I wouldn't have gotten into blogging in the first place if all it was was "something cool that other people were doing".  What was the problem with AIM that caused people to move to gchat?  Nothing, really.  I still use my AIM account.  Why would I leave something behind when I can keep it going?  Isn't it sad to see all of those blogs that your friends make that have 3 or 4 posts on them?  Isn't it sad to always see that most recent post, titled "I'm still here", ensuring everyone that no, I'm going to keep posting, there's no way this will be the last post, yet...it ends up being that way anyways?

I've made 3,758 posts over there at my Xanga site.  Impressive, isn't it?  But at the end of May, my friend notified me that the Xanga team had made this post, which is essentially the "okay guys...this is it...we're sinking unless we can scrape together something new".  Of course, they seem hopeful about relaunching on Wordpress and everything, but moving to a paid blogging model, combined with the fact that Xanga is already so much of a dinosaur...I think this is the time when everyone's going to abandon ship.

At that point it was up to me to decide what to do for my blog.  It seemed pretty clear that I shouldn't hope for Xanga to pull its act together, so it was time to migrate elsewhere.  I considered Wordpress (dot com), but a lot of the customizability is paid, so I couldn't even find a nice monospaced font layout, etc.  I actually considered moving over to LiveJournal, since that seemed like the closest thing to what I already had.  Community-based blogging, with a sort of...I don't know...just, the "feel" of it is really similar.  I've always had a soft spot in my heart for LJ.  But I don't know what the health of LJ is--who's to say that it won't meet the same end as Xanga did?  For all the LJ users out there, I sincerely hope it doesn't.  I like LJ a lot, from what I've seen.  Xanga has added a lot of cruft (think MySpace), so I can understand why it's not as appealing to new users, but it seems like LJ is still what LJ has always been, which I think is great.

Anyways, I remembered about Blogger/Blogspot and decided that this was actually the solution that I've been looking for.  It hits all the criteria--has comments, I like the style and interface, the customization is what I want, and I can crosspost to FB and Twitter with Twitterfeed.  I could actually crosspost to G+ if I wanted to, but that requires me to use my G+ profile name instead of DDRKirby(ISQ), which I don't like, and...okay, let's face it, G+ isn't really too important nowadays (has it ever been?).  So that's okay.

Yes, I'm losing the community-based blogging that Xanga had, but...to be honest, that's been gone for such a long time now, because my blogging community was made up of my friends from high school, and -that- whole phase only lasted a short while...maybe a year, maybe two years?  Something like that.

So this is my new home.  As much as I cling onto the past, sometimes we have to move on.  Just like I had to say goodbye to my high school, and just like I had to say goodbye to college.  In some ways, I still feel like my premium studio room back at Munger is my real home.  I miss it a lot.  But I'm not there anymore, I'm at a new place.  Some things have to change.

I've been changing a lot.  I've always said that I changed a lot in high school.  I changed significantly in college too, just more "subtly", if that makes sense.  I think the change now is different--more rapid, more intense.  It makes sense, when I think about it.  I've always believed I'm a water-type, and I think the change this time is more like splashes, more like ripples from something, rather than the natural ebb-and-flow waves that are normally here.

But the change is still good, still welcome.  Even though I wasn't intending on moving this blog, I'm sure it'll be a good move.  Things already look cleaner, don't they?  How do you feel about it?

I think my biggest fear is that I'd stop posting.  I'm already worried about that.  Is that silly?  I think it's just because I've seen it happen again and again, and I know that I'm posting a bit less nowadays too.  It's still supposed to be the same blog, really, but because it's a new home, it just feels like I'm starting something anew, and in that sense, it doesn't feel like it's "proven".  I haven't shown to myself that this is something that I'm going to keep up with.  And I'm scared of that.

It might seem silly...I mean, if I don't want to keep posting, why should I force it?  I don't know...I think that's just a value that I hold very strongly--to stick to what I start, to keep going.  That's always been my way.

I guess the reason that my posting has been slowing down is both because of a lack of "free lazy time" (which bothers me), but also just that I have things that I simply don't want to say to everyone anymore.  It makes me sad, because I've always been such an open book, but I know that there are some things that are better left unsaid.  Perhaps it just seems a little bit less "tactful" to me now, to talk aloud about these things now.  Weird...why have I always been so vocal in the first place, when I'm such a quiet person?  I remember that it made perfect sense, that I needed to express myself in this way because I don't express myself with my voice, but somehow, that doesn't seem as relevant as it used to.

Maybe it's because I'm finding more in my actual life?  Maybe it's because I have less to be bitter about, less to rant about, less to vent about...maybe it's because I'm simply less lonely?  I'm not sure.

But let's forget about all of that for a second, and just be happy to be here.  It's our new home.  We don't know what the future may hold, but that's okay.  It's all gonna be okay.

And of course, we can take a moment to remember all of the memories and thoughts that I poured into the old blog.  Of course, I'm archiving it all, so I still have it, but it won't be in the same form, it won't be in the same place...in a way, it'll be "gone", even though I'll still have the records around.  It's a shame that even the links in this post itself may someday be defunct.

Even if I didn't have all of the records, though, it would still be meaningful.  It wouldn't be a waste, would it?  Of course not.  To be honest, I probably won't look through the archives very much at all--it just helps me feel less sad to have them there...makes it feel like I haven't lost anything.  So it wouldn't make much practical difference, if the whole site was just -gone- (though I'm so, so thankful that it isn't that way).  Each one of those 3,758 posts that I made might not have much significance now, but they all carried significance at that time.

Ahh, it looks like I'm still writing long and drawn-out posts sometimes, huh?  It's a great feeling, to know that some things haven't changed...

Another Test

...are we cross-posting yet?

Just a Test...

...because I need to set up crossposting, twitterfeed, and all that fancy stuff before I actually start using this.  Looks like this might be my new home, though :)