I had a stroke of genius this morning in the shower.

People should make shampoo bottles that have poems on the back.

I found myself reading the back of a shampoo bottle while in the shower this morning, because I was bored and I was showering and I like reading things to keep my eyes and mind occupied. (This is why I read the backs of cereal boxes when I was a child.)

Then I realized what I was doing, and I went, "You know, this is kind of stupid. Why have I stooped to reading the back of shampoo bottles?"

And then I went, "It's because there's nothing else to read."

And then I went, "You know, that's kind of stupid."

I then tried to figure out how to solve this problem. I immediately thought that shampoo companies should print shampoo bottles with short stories on the back, but then I realized that most short stories are probably too long to put on the back of shampoo bottles. Short stories that short are just not that common. But then I realized that there is an abundance of short poems in the world and an abundance of people who are willing to write them.

Think of it. They could have a different poem for each scent/variety of shampoo. And it could vaguely correspond to whatever impression they think the scent/variety of shampoo is trying to give off. And since everybody uses shampoo, it would be really great exposure for poets. It would be a really prestigious (or at least impressive) thing to get your poem on the back of a shampoo bottle. Maybe it would become a trend. Maybe poetry would spread to other sorts of packaging, and society would engage in a mass movement to put poetry in places where it wasn't put before.

Maybe I'm really onto something here.

What I'm doing

Working on a new novel right now. I haven't abandoned the previous one but I am writing a new one, and I can justify this because I'm young, I'm still trying to figure out what works, I'm still trying to figure out how I write and what I write and what I want to write and what conditions are best for me to write in.

Thus essentially everything I produce during this time is going to be experimental in some way, in the sense that I'm experimenting to try to figure out what I can settle down with. I think it'd be wrong of me not to experiment with my writing during this time because if I don't try a lot of things, I won't figure out which of them work best for me, and then I'd find myself stuck writing things in a way that wasn't conducive for me writing things.

I've been aware of this for a while and this explains why I've been starting a lot of novels that came to nothing (or nothing yet) lately. I'm aware of my situation. There's a reason for this senseless waste of writing. I just haven't expressed this fact until now.

I'm not indecisive, it's not that I can't finish things, it's just that I understand my current situation of being young and not understanding how I write due to my prior assumption that I already knew how I write and my refusal to acknowledge that I didn't already know how I write.

My acknowledgement of how young and immature I am is the most mature thing I can do right now and being apparently irresponsible with my writing is the most responsible thing I can do here. Through not knowing what I'm doing, I know exactly what I'm doing.

That's all.

Things that have Really Hit Me in the past twenty-four hours or so:

• Given that I have little if not zero capacity for empathy, I also have no frame of reference to understand what it's like to have empathy (with all my assumptions about empathy coming from either psychology-based material I've read on it, real or fictitious situations I'm aware of where someone's capacity for empathy was important, or my own assumptions or inductions about it). This means that anything I say about empathy or how it is expressed in other people is a little bit like someone who's been deaf since birth trying to explain a piece of music.
• There are people I know - my family, my friends, even people to whom I don't talk very often - who see me not as I see other people (i.e. animate objects, albeit ones with needs) but as most other people see other people. The fact that other people see me as an Actual Real Person is more overwhelming than you would think.
• Space is big. Vastly, overwhelmingly big. I have lately become more aware of the size of space than I usual and all I have to say is that it has Really Hit Me how big space is.

There is no reason I should be able to effectively have relationships

There are extremely self-centered and unhealthy things about my relationships and how I see the people around me. The qualities for which I appreciate my friends tends to be about how they interact with me (that is, qualities/behaviors that are actually good but that would not exist without me, because they regard the person in regards to me). I base many of my relationships off of things that are not mutual respect, concern, and intimacy; rather, I gravitate towards attachment and fascination in my forming relationships, like people are objects I'm familiar with or that interest me.

And yet last night, I was explaining to a friend that I "put up with her" because I'm familiar with her and I can interact with her well and not necessarily because I think she's a good person, and she was genuinely happy to hear that. And today, I was telling another friend that I appreciated how he understood me (and only specifically me), and it relieved his self-loathing.

I'm convinced I exist in this sort of bubble that makes its own little alternative universe where horribly unhealthy things can actually be very healthy and functional, and anyone who's in any sort of relationship with me is assimilated (at least in their interactions with me) into this bubble and all the things that are wrong with how I act and see people are actually completely okay.

Either that or maybe I attract people whose tendencies and perceptions are equally unhealthy.

It could be both.

Love

You know what?

I was thinking about some things and I realized that I've assimilated someone I know into my concept of "people who are associated with me". That is, the circle of people I've come to view as parts of myself, or as being "mine", or in some other way connected to me in a way that allows my lack of empathy and narcissistic emotions to feel for them.

And you know what else?

It occurred to me that this might mean that I love that person. There's very little logical reason for me to love them (we don't talk very much, we don't share any common interests of which I'm aware, we aren't close) but nevertheless, I could possibly qualify my feelings towards them as love.

And you know what else?

Since literally the only thing keeping me from loving them is the fact that I have not qualified my feelings as love - that is, I simply haven't said I love them - then maybe love is just saying you feel a certain way. Maybe it's not how you feel. Maybe it's just how you choose to view and describe the way you feel. So in theory, I could choose to describe my feelings towards literally everyone as love. If I called it love, and if I chose to view it as love, who's to keep me from saying that it really is love?

Maybe I just figured out something.

Easter and suicide

This Easter, I was struck with the weird realization that the true meaning of the holiday is the reason being suicidal is easier for me than it would be if I weren't a Christian.

I'm a Christian (as I may have mentioned in previous blog posts). I believe Jesus Christ died for my sins and rose on the third day so I'll go to Heaven when I die, all that stuff. All the stuff they talk about in church and especially during the Easter service, such as the one I went to this morning.

However, I'm also depressed and suicidal for reasons that mostly translate to "I don't really think life is very enjoyable and there's not too much I want to do, and even the things I appear to like are just distractions from the fact that my experience in life is monotonous at best and painful at worst".

This has led to the interesting situation where I wouldn't actually kill myself (1. because I'm supposed to live on this Earth to do stuff for God, and it wouldn't be very nice to Him if I quit my job before he wanted me to, so to speak, and 2. I don't really have the guts to go through something like that), but I'm still not very keen on life, and dying doesn't bother me because I know I'm going to go to Heaven when I die. Which, if you think about it, almost gives me yet another reason to not want to live. I'm too keenly aware of the fact that, for me as a Christian, I'm going to get something much better after life when I die. I'm keenly aware that the monotony of life is going to be followed by something better than the best Earthly life imaginable. Knowing that gives one hope in the face of death but it does not necessarily do a lot in the face of life.

Easter is the celebration of the day Jesus rose from the dead, conquered sin and death, and made it so that his followers don't have to fear dying. Easter is the celebration of the event that removed any kind of fear of death itself that might keep me from killing myself.

It's also why it's difficult for me to find a lot of anti-suicide arguments that help me. People say that, if you're trying to find relief from your life and you therefore want to commit suicide, you shouldn't do that because you can't find relief when you're dead. But that's not true. Well. At least it's not true for me and other Christians. I mean, when I die, my spirit will go on and I'll be in Heaven, where none of the bad things about the world will follow me, and...to be honest, thinking about what happens after death makes suicide seem even more appealing. Not like I'd actually do it. But it certainly blows giant holes in a particular argument against the act.

(Also, for those who are curious - I don't believe that committing suicide automatically bars one from going to Heaven, provided one had accepted Jesus into one's heart previously. Different people believe different things, but what I believe and what seems most Biblically-correct to me is that, when you're a Christian, God forgives you for every sin you committed previously and will forgive you for every sin committed afterward as soon as it is committed. Actually, it's more like what Jesus did on the Cross cancels out what you did in the past as well as what you'll do in the future, so you don't even need to be forgiven when you sin, because it's already been forgiven in advance. The argument that suicide automatically sends one to Hell hinges upon the correct assumption that murder is a sin but the less-sound arguments that 1. one isn't forgiven by God for a sin until one asks for forgiveness (you can't ask for forgiveness in your life if you're already dead), and/or 2. there exist certain sins for which God will not forgive you, ever. I don't believe either of these two things and I don't believe the Bible supports them, so I don't think suicide would automatically send you to Hell. Again. Not like I'm saying you should commit suicide if you're a Christian, but I'm just saying that certain arguments against suicide in Christians are inaccurate.)

I sat through the entire Easter service thinking about this and it gave me a kind of nervous freakout that I don't think anyone around me caught onto but that only subsided when I got home and took some of my anti-anxiety medication.

Everyone wants to celebrate today as a day about life, and I know that's true, but I can't think about it without thinking about death and wishing I were there.

My characters are acting like they're in a book, sort of

I will never get over how meta my novel is.

It's probably because two major characters are deeply influenced by books and fiction. One of them claims he essentially learned to speak from books (and observed that someone else in the story speaks like he's from a book), and he chose his own name for no reason other than that it literally sounded like the sort of name someone from a book would have. Another is...I was going to say "manipulating" but it's not so much that as "directing"? her situation so that it resembles something that might happen in fiction.

I'm sure there is some sort of message or theme here. (So far what I'm getting is "don't try to live your life like it's a book or you will end up sad because these people ended up said", though they would have ended up sad even if they hadn't consciously acted as though they were in fiction.) At any rate, it's amusing me.