Of course I'm a complex person,

I grew up in a quiet peaceful town that I now hate with a passion and cannot stand

I was a quiet peaceful uber-nice school-minded kid until I decided that I wasn't in fact and that I'd rather have friends, so I somehow became a sarcastic, dark, slacker teenager---throughout both stages I was lacking in self-esteem, but then who wasn't, really.

I grew up worshiping my parents, particularly my mother, then I slowly realized they weren't perfect, then I began to hate them as part of the previously mentioned process, plus they were frankly a bit stifling just when I needed independence, so I just basically avoided talking to them throughout most of college. Now I've learned to love them again.

I'm smart. There I said it, lotsa times smart kids feel awkward and are weird ass people.

I grew up pretty darn Catholic, talked to God, hated going to Church (because I had to dress up and it was boring as hell--irony intended) but believed in my religion, its precepts, and most else that went with it. Then I became an agnostic for a decade. Now I'm pretty sure I'll end up back in some religion (though not my old one).

So yeah, I mean, I know you're thinking it. "Lotsa people's stories are just like this one."

So what? Whoop-dee-doo. Doesn't change the fact that I'm complicated, now does it.


Oh yeah, and I've been deeply introspective and self-aware since the age of seven. I actually remember sitting at my desk in second grade and trying to go back through my memories to decide when I first became self-conscious, like aware of my own thinking, aware that I was thinking. Failing to come up with an answer I decided that right there and then would have to serve as the lowest limit.

oh yeah, Dear Diary

I guess I'm sort of finding God and religion lately

to my initial surprise, and later dis-surprise, I don't think this is going to change very much about who I am, what I write, or how I see the world

but it will give who I am, what I believe and feel, and how I live a structure

at least this is what I hope/think


at the least, I am absolutely confident that the process is not incongruous with my personality type

Growing up in Redlands

When I was a real little kid my mother told me to hold her hand, to look both ways, twice, to always stay where I could see her, not to talk to strangers and a dozen potential disasters that might follow if I did--these, to my mind, were the normal forebodings of the mother of a child in a fearsome world.


When I got a bit older and I needed to get away, I would come out from the inside places of our house at night and sit under the streetlamp on the curb. I would look down our tame suburban street, look up at the warm Southern California sky, and think how cruel it all was. Here there were poor people and homeless people--how did no one else take care of them?--there were killers and criminals--would they hurt me too?--dangers and uncertainties and limitless imaginative potentials.

And I hardly knew it, but some deeper part of me was thinking, half with fear and half with yearning, this is the beginning of the real world, it starts right here and stretches out beyond the unknown, this is it.

I believe: That just as there are an infinite number of points between any given two points on a line segment, so too does any temporal segment of our lives offer infinite experience--we're just not keen enough to pick it all up. That we owe a debt, out of common humanity, to those less fortunate than us. That environmental unsustainability means dramatically and dangerously reducing the quality and security of life for future generations and in doing so endangers human civilization as we know it. That furthermore said environmental unsustainability runs much deeper than any single red flag issue on the environmental platform but rather is deeply rooted in the way we see daily economic decisions, time, personal and communal responsibilities, and human beings relationship with nature in both a practical and a spiritual sense. That life is a miracle. That almost all of the world's problems in some way or another spring from ignorance, denial, and inherited prejudices--and I believe that because, and I've said it before, there are people in the world who, if you knew them, you would love, and having loved them you would pay dearly to see their lives bettered--in less hippy-ish terms I mean that if there were no barriers to conveyance of human experience (opportunity costs, transaction costs, information distortion, the obvious limitations of human language...) good-hearted people would act to ease and/or prevent their fellows' sufferings. That the world needs to change fundamentally.