May 2006 Archives
If becoming who you want to be means that you have to give up everything you love, then it probably isn't who you want to be.
The heart is a swirling mass of conflicting emotions. Flowing between self-preservation, caring for people who are special in our lives and the decision proccess that often falls between those two places. One must find the proper balance between the two to have a happy life. Humans are socially dynamic, which creates a situation where it isn't always possible to maintain the same people throughout one's life. Friends often pull apart because of a social distance that is formed when the friends begin to develop independant (im starting to hate that word) interests and begin to grow in personality in different directions. Friendships are as fragile as the weakest personality in them. When that weakness is added to something like a loss of trust in a friendship, then the friendship will likely hang in uncertainty until the friendship quietly vanishes, or things improve and the friendship rebuilds itself. I find myself presently at this uncertainty, and wish I had a bit of guidance. As I think of what form such guidance might take I realize all of the offers I have had from my network of friends asking me to talk to them when I have problems. This situation I believe is beyond the abilities of that network, I think at the moment the only thing that will help me is having a strong conversation with the friend and determining where things stand. It is never easy losing friends, it is much more noble to rebuild and not let differences ruin what has been so good for so long. It now occurs to me now that perhaps the problem is not with the friendship, but with the "rules of interaction". Since we have changed, perhaps the friendship has to change as well to accept the new dynamic.
I sit here in my room crying as I look back on the past few months of my life. In just a few weeks I have managed to alienate myself from my friends, exclude myself from family events and almost entirely ignore my academic responsibilities. It is a lonely feeling when you realize there is no one left to turn to because of mistakes you have made, not because you aren't liked. Several months ago I think I began to lose my connection to reality and float off into my own world isolated from any other people. I have developed a infamously short temper, one which everyone who knows me tries to walk on egg shells to avoid. Lately that temper has not been set off by anger, but by hurt. In the proccess my temper hurts others, and I feel even worse in the end.
Yesterday I made a policy to myself to stop hating myself and to try to find the better qualities of myself and let them shine. Today I tried to use those qualities, only to find myself rejected by my friends in the attempt. I guess they thought I wanted something, or somehow wasn't sincere in my attempts. It makes me happy to do things for people and to share things I have done with people, but if that gets thrown in my face, then where do I get my happiness?
One of the most burdening of my traits is being gay. I used to be able to talk to my friends about things in that area that bothered me, but my high school friends have been gone for a long time, and my other friends either don't care, or I am not comfortable enough talking to them. My family has been intentionally left out of things because I rely on them for everything in my life, and because of this, I feel that I can't really tell them the truth without risking everything in my life. I have become so closed off that my family hasn't even seen things like my ceramics website, or any of my academic work. In my life I am missing someone who loves me, and someone who cares about things I do. It seems like everyone in my life that I care about either doesn't care about me, or is already too emotionally damaged themselves to be able to care about me unselfishly. Some people care about me because im useful, reliable or can be used as a shoulder to cry on. Another problem I have had in the past is people being too busy to have someone in their lives with such high emotional needs as I have. Sometimes I feel like I should come with a warning sticker "WARNING - High Maintainance Friend".
I get sick of all of the fights between myself and my friends, the constant depressed feeling, feeling like I am overly emotional and feeling like I want to kill myself. Tonight I am actually feeling ok, between an encouraging phone call from a friend and expressing things that are bothering me through this entry, I am feeling better. Tonight I avoided the fights by pulling out of the situation and reflecting inward for answers to my problems, I wasn't depressed because I was too busy looking for happy thoughts, my spare emotions are on this page, and finally I didn't feel like I wanted to kill myself, not sure why that is, but I guess I found a reason to live.
During the first week of my website, Clay Mentality, being online I have been monitoring its logs closely. I have watched as the expected visitors (my friends), welcome suprise visitors (search bots) and some unwelcome suprise visitors (unknown IPs, which have already started SPAMing email on the new domain).
Last week when I was preparing to unviel the site, the blog entry had been written for days, but it wasn't until the last minute (literally, no more than 5 minutes before live) that I decided to register the ClayMentality.org domain. I was going to use a subdomain of one of my other domains for this purpose originally. ClayMentality.org is the first domain that I have registered AFTER the content was written, so it was destined to be a unique experience.
In the first day of the site, most of the visitors were friends who had recieved notification of the site via the blog. In the second day I was visited by a few friendly bots (new domain names attract attention). Throughout the last 5 days the traffic pattern has been mostly stable with return visitors (yes, you Oscar), as well as new visitors as news of the site spreads across my network of friends, and with the help of the bots, the Internet.
During the first few days of operation the site had a critical bug, the code used for protecting some of my administrative scipts from illegitimate use was accidentally being used to protect the proccessing code for the "Contact Me" form, oops. That issue is now corrected and the form is functioning normally.
The site was launched without 2 standard files in place, the robots exclusion file (for bots) and the favorite icon file; I have now implemented both, so the bots are happy and people using FireFox with too many tabs open should also be happy.
The bots that have checked the site so far include: Googlebot (Google's crawler), SLURP (Yahoo's bot), Internet Archive (archive.org). Websense (a bot looking for porn), and NetCraft (checking the server for its software and uptime).
So far no one has registered for the gallery, which suprises me, since I installed the new gallery system specificly for the purpose of allowing comments, rating and an overall more interacting image viewing experience.
The first week hasn't been very eventful, but the site does feel alive, which makes me feel like throwing something :-)
It brings me great joy to announce the completion of my new ceramics website, Clay Mentality. This is my formal return to having a web presence. Several years ago as I slowly let more things out of my life, I gave up on having a personal website. A personal website without passion is nothing more than a dynamic autobiography. In the art of ceramics, I have found my passion, and my desire to open my world to the eyes of everyone.
During the past few weeks I have been working on and off with this project, in order to give me some distance from it as I allowed it to evolve around my habbits. For the first time ever I have managed to keep a secret. Only one person has been privilleged to see this site before its launch; Chris has given me much input on the site's design as well as provided me with some technical tips for some elements of the site. On the topic of the secret, I have never seen anyone more interested in seeing a website I have created as my friends seem to have been when I told them that they would have to wait. I would like to thank everyone for their paitience and support during the development of the site.
And without further rambleing, I am proud to introduce, Clay Mentality:
Clay Mentality - http://www.claymentality.org
In addition to the website I am also announcing the new gallery for my blog. I have selected a new software, which allows for flexibility, as well as added functionality. For all features to be availible to you, you will need to register with the gallery software. Once registered you will have access to any special galleries I may have decided to post privately, and you will have the ability to comment on images/galleries. Registering is important if you wish to interact with the gallery.
New Gallery - http://www.disturbingthoughts.net/gallery2
