Ich bin fraviert

I feel like I should post something.
about how other people have entirely different lives that I know nothing about.
How the government tricks us into thinking we need to eat 3 meals a day.
How society raises us to categorize our relationships and believe that we should (especially at my age) be finding an oppositely-gendered heterosexual partner.

I don't understand how this happens.
how does it happen that you can trick yourself into thinking you know someone well enough to correctly judge that you could merge lives with them? Why is this something people pay attention for? Sometimes I think that I don't know what I want, because my standards of what counts as friendship are much different than what everyone else seems to go off of.
Leave me alone, society.
Just let me keep my friends.


i just want people to be free.

This post needs major editing and will probably be deleted, or attached as a comment because I refuse to delete things.

Oh, and I'm not sure what timestamp this post would show, but I wrote it at like 1:00 or something am on the 20th

***I'm choosing to edit. The current time is 21:28 on Sept 30th. I am somewhat removed from the ideas I previously wanted to write about, but I'll try to do them justice. I'm sure they'll pop back up again sometime in the future, anyway. I have a rough outline I wrote for myself back on the 20th which I will now try to flesh out.

A friend of mine told me a story in which her father was trying to order plane tickets to fly from Los Angeles to Germany. Her father can speak German fluently, and was conversing with the airline representative in German on the phone. He was trying to ask for tickets from Los Angeles to Germany, but the represetative kept telling him Du bist fraviert - you are confused, that's not really what you want. Naturally, this was upsetting since her father was convinced that he did, in fact, want tickets to fly from California to Germany. But always, the response was Du bist fraviert - that's not what you want. This is what you want: you want tickets from New York. No. Not New York. Cal-i-forn-ia. This went on for a while until he realized that what they were trying to say was that they didn't have a flight from Germany to Los Angeles. Her father would have to buy a ticket with a layover in New York. But they wouldn't come out and tell him that directly (I think this is a cultural thing), and instead tried to tell him nicely that he was mistaken and only thought he wanted a ticket from California when really he wanted a ticket from New York.

Sometimes I wonder how confused I really am.

Do I want to be in a relationship?
That's a stupid question. There are many kinds of relationships. Certainly, I do not wish to be isolated.
The question now is,
Do I want to be in a romantic relationship?
It seems like the thing to do. The vast majority of people my age have had a boyfriend or a girlfriend by now. It also seems like an expectation that people who don't currently have a boyfriend or girlfriend would want one. Some friends tell me that even if it doesn't work out, it can be beautiful and worth it. This seems true, but maybe not necessary. And there are many beautiful things in the world that are not romance-related. I think sometimes we focus too much on things we don't have to appreciate the situation that we're in right now. I'm in college, I'm doing interesting things, I'm learning interesting things, I'm learning more about myself and who I want to be, and I don't feel like I have enough of that for myself to really be able share with someone else. This is also a little strange because my parents met each other in college. They got married before they both went to Grad School. If I was my mom, I think I would have met my dad by now. I don't know how they had time and energy for each other.
I probably sound pretty selfish so far. I should clarify that if I was in a romantic relationship, I would make sure that I put what I felt was the appropriate time, energy, quantity of myself into it. But that's not the current situation, and I'm not planning to go try to get myself into such a situation any time soon.

My standard of a friendship is pretty high. I think that I probably have/had some friendships that are/were closer than many other peoples' romantic relationships. I think that in general, we are more influenced to emupate models in society and in our every day experiences than we'd like to admit. Specifically, I think many people only start dating because the are eligible, and it seems like the next thing to do. It's what people do, right? Isn't it the right idea?
Many of our relationship terms seem to be categories imposed over a spectrum of involvment between two people. I'm not really sure about these categories and how they relate to actual situations. Like I said, I think I tend to count friendships as a closer relationship than I seem to observe in the general population. Sometimes I wonder if my standard for a romantic relationship is impractical. Anytime that I've been in what I considered to be a really good friendship with a guy, other people have assumed (incorrectly) that we were dating just because we seemed to understand each other and spent time with each other. I actually get really annoyed with feeling like I have a crush on someone. It's so distracting. It feels like having tunnel vision or blinders to the rest of the world. I get frustrated about all the things I'm probably missing because for some reason, I have to focus on some person. It's so useless. Most of the time, I know that nothing can come of it, so I just have to convince myself that I don't need this, and to release the focus.
Yet another of my friends told me of a version of Utopia he'd read about. In it, there was love, but not marriage - it wasn't that exclusive. And there was no sex. He seemed to find acceptable grounds for the first part, but the Utopia with no sex part really seemed to baffle him. I don't know, that Utopia sounded pretty good to me (No, I have not had sex).
Sometimes I don't handle a crush right, and it gets worse. It actually starts feeling good, and I become concerned for their life as much as, if not more than my own. I start wondering what Love is and if this qualifies (so far, the answer is always no). And the more I think about it, the more I wonder if,
maybe this is how I should love everyone.

Everyone is a pretty big thing to think about. I guess I'll just try to start with loving each person I know as much as possible, and it seems that the more I know about someone, the easier it is to identify with them and love them - they become beautiful.

My image of love right now is one of those braided ropes they have on huge ships. I've heard that if you get a foot caught in a loop when the line is going out - like on an anchor - it can cut right through your ankle. In The Old Man and the Sea, the Old Man can tell so much about what's going on under the water by feeling the minute tremors of the line at the surface. I've also heard (perhaps in The Old Man and the Sea) that if such a rope is stretched taut when wet, that the water springs from its surface like fleas. How much tension, how much strength must be on that rope, yet it holds? I think perhaps, that this is something that Love is like.

I think I should establish this sort of connection as a priority with God before I go about trying to find or build it here among people. I currently think that it would be pretty awesome if I could connect with someone in this way. I also think it would be awesome if everyone felt connected and supported by each other this way. Whether or not it would be better to be in a 'relationship' or not, I definitely shouldn't underestimate the valuable time I have now by myself. There is so much work to be done, and so many beautiful things in the world that perhaps someday I can share with someone else, but that I should learn to properly enjoy on my own first.

I'm not confused. I know what I want.
I want, as some grafitti in the girls' bathroom advocates: "Peace, Love, and redistribution of wealth."
I want people to be agents in their own lives, despite the categories that society compels compliance to.
I want my friends to be able to go home to Sudan and rebuild their country.
I want the people on the edge to be remembered
and to know that they are not forgotten.
I want the meek to inherit the earth, I want those who mourn to be comforted, I want love to be real and active and intentional and to drive out fear.
no more fear, no more hatred, no more misunderstanding, no more separation.
love.
I think God wants these things too, and I want to work with him.

The confusing part is figuring out how to go about this. Sometimes I think it should just be me and God, and I will take his dreams for my own. But you know, if the whole world had that mentality, we'd miss out on the human community that God seems to encourange, and the blessing of being able, even commanded, to love one another.

Finding ways to work for these things seems more important to me than finding someone to call a boyfriend. And it wouldn't work out unless he wanted all these things too.

I guess I do want someone to share life with. Life is multiplied, not divided, when it is shared.
But I don't trust the commonly accepted societal terms of how I should go about sharing my life.

Apparently, all I can think of right now is to write things on this blog.
And I can't bring myself to type 'I love you' because blogs seem a little more distant than that. So far.

The time is 23:07, 9.30.2006