Bla...

On Thursday I was at the library checking out the Viking Portable Jung. I had been reading something else on the internet and it was making references to archetypal characters identified in Jung's writing and I got interested. I thought it might help me figure myself out a little. Anyway, while I was scanning the shelves around it a children's book caught my eye. It seemed a little out of place in the psychology section. So I picked it up and began reading it.

It was titled something like "Let's Make Some Friends!" At once I began to mentally criticise it. It was like so much other self help literature that I don't trust. "Follow our proven program to happiness..." But I continued to flip through it. One of it's first admonitions was that if we were going to make friends then we had to like ourselves. Why would we ask someone else to like someone we didn't, even if that person was our self? It was an interesting question; one to which I've struggled to find the answer for years. I'm still looking.

Anyway, as the solution to the problem of self-esteem, the book suggested sitting down and making a list of everything that we did well. The illustrations on the page showed a little black kid with a curly hair sitting at a school desk scribbling on a piece of paper with his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth in concentration.

From there the book went on, but I was kind of stuck there. How did the boy determine what he did well? What did "well" mean? By what standard was he measuring himself? To whom was he comparing himself to determine his worth? Could it be arbitrary? I am the best at brushing my teeth the way that I brush them, but I am horrible at brushing them the way the dentist wishes I would.

When I was a young boy I compared myself to members of my family. If I was better than Peter at something then I was thrilled and exhilarated. I knew I was good, but I was scared too, because it upset the natural order of things. Later on I compared myself to my classmates. I was all about being better than them at the things I wanted to be good at. There were a lot of problems with that standard too, the least of which was that I kept running up against the fact that no matter how good I became at anything that you'd turn over a rock and find someone else that did it twice as good without even trying.

At that point being the best at anything started to become meaningless to me. I couldn't compare myself to anyone and try to be better. I tried to go by the standard of pleasing myself with my efforts for a while. I guess it didn't stick, or I lost it along the way somehow. Obviously it didn't make enough sense to me to try to really run with it.

My mission changed things a lot. I got stuck on the idea of justification. I just wanted to be good enough, to be a good enough person to please God. I didn't ever feel so good about how I was doing though because of that whole "Be ye therefore perfect," thing. I know everyone who reads this is going to think, "But that's what mercy is for, because no one can live by that standard at this stage of life". Sadly, mercy doesn't make sense to me. I kind of get it intellectually, but it's like most math to me. I can see how to do it how to do it sometimes and why to do it, but it doesn't make much of an impression on my mind, and I resist it. That analogy doesn't work all of the way, but hopefully enough that those among readers will remember having tried to explain math concepts to me and get it. If you've stumbled here accidentally and are reading incidentally them mazal tov, welcome to my life.

Anyway, bla bla bla. So, the standard was perfection, I wanted justification, I don't deal well with the concept of mercy, and I didn't go anywhere for a lot of years with that. Somewhat recently I got tired of trying to be anything and kind of gave up. So all of this leads to Friday.

Mark invited me to go to an International Dinner with his ward. I was picturing going eating some food and going back to his place to do something else. We made some Thai peanutbutter grilled chicken. Somewhere along the way Mark was talking about going on a date with a girl the other night. I asked how he felt about her and he just kind of shrugged. He said he should have known because it was almost a year between when he asked her out the first time and took her out again the second time. He said he just couldn't feel that interested and that he had tried. I asked you could ever really honestly make yourself feel anything by trying. He replied you probably could not but then said maybe just by force of will. I didn't tell him I disagreed. That's why I stopped trying to date about a year ago.

I felt weird pretty much from the moment that I walked in. I haven't really been to any church activities at all for a while and I just felt a bad feeling being there. I felt really uncomfortable, but I tried not to let it get to me. Mark wandered around talking to girls and I sat at a table surrounded by people I'd met incidentally but didn't feel like I could talk to. The children's book was in my mind. So was Dad's comment to me the other day that he thought that my discomfort when I went to church wasn't with church but transference of my own feelings about myself. I tried to think of things to say to people, and tried not to feel as bad as I was beginning to feel.

I couldn't tell Mark outright that I wanted to leave and get on with the evening, but I tried to let him know. Then someone found a basketball and my heart sank. Half an hour later I was sitting alone, and a bunch of guys were alpha-maleing. Mark asked me if I wanted to play and I told him that I felt like I was flashing back back to p-day's from my mission. He didn't get it. In that moment I was feeling about as depressed as I tried not to realize I felt most of the time on my mission. It was a trapped feeling. After a while I realized that I wasn't on my mission and asked Mark if he could find a ride home, and I left. I was really miserable as I drove home. I went immediately to bed even though it wasn't quite nine yet. I had to get away from feeling as bad as I felt.

So it's Sunday night, and I'm realizing why this was all so disturbing to me. Mike Forsberg lost his job at the DA's office last week and is probably moving back to Cache Valley, and Mark is going to be moving to Provo again to work as a law clerk. Summer is coming and I won't have school to distract me. I see another crack up on the horizon.

Anyway, in the grand tradition of Mike-ness this is all pretty pathetic, and I'm tired of it myself. As sang Billy Joel, "The good old days weren't always good, and tomorrow's not as bad as it seems." I'm sure things will be fine. It just won't seem like it, but that's probably just because I'm me.

Holy Crap, People Read This...

I spoke to my brother Peter on the phone the other day and he said that Cami had put up a new video of Calvin on their blog. I went to it and watched it, and realized two things. First, their life is far more interesting than mine. Second, Cami really kind of has a knack for blogging. Maybe I'm biased because I'm interested in their lives, but she really seems to put things together in an appealing and intriguing way. In any case, I was looking at all of the links on the side of the page and saw one to my blog. Following this link I found that I hadn't posted in a very long time. Also I noticed that there were some comments on the last post. I was astounded to find out that people actually read the blog and checked it from time to time. That kind of blew me away, and I decided that on the off chance that anyone was still checking back here from time to time that i should really post something new.

So, I went out and got in my car and drove to the Albertsons to buy some milk. This is an illustration of how I feel about writing and about sharing anything about myself these days. If there's anything else I can distract myself with, I'll do that instead.

On Sunday I looked at my phone and realized that there was a message from Mark LaRocco. I called him back and he told me that there was going to be a birthday party for a girl he'd introduced me to a year or two ago and he asked me if I wanted to go with him. I guess I was lonely, because I said yes. We arrived at her apartment and there were about five people there. We sat down and I watched Mark talk to people, then the room was filled. A few times girls came and sat down next to me and asked me who I was and what I did, so I told them and when I didn't ask them anything about themselves or try to figure out what we had in common they would drift away. Then this really pretty girl came in and all of the guys in the room immediately approached her like iron filing to a lodestone. It was really kind of funny. It looked choreographed. They all broke their conversations and walked directly to the center of the room where she was standing and encircled her.

After a while she sat down next to me and didn't speak to me. I thought she was waiting for me to speak to her, assuming that because she was the pretty girl that it was my responsibility to be the aggressor and she the defender. I really enjoyed ignoring her as we sat there, less than six inches apart. I could tell it was throwing her that I didn't even look at her.

Finally they cut the cake and I ate a piece, then Mark and I left. As we were getting in Mark's truck we started talking about the pretty girl. He said that he'd gone out with her once before, but hadn't asked her out again because he figured that she was too pretty and he didn't want to deal with that baggage. I told him about how much I'd enjoyed not talking to her, and watching her squirming when I didn't pay attention to her. He said that was kind of too bad because it wasn't that she was conceited, but rather that she was notoriously shy. In that moment I realized that I had acted kind of like a jerk, and also that I'm hopelessly far from being capable of developing a significant relationship with a girl and that I won't be doing so any time soon.

Anyway, that's probably enough about me for just now. So, I guess I should put a picture up. I haven't taken any for the last couple of weeks, but here's the latest of me. There's a good chance you've seen it elsewhere.