Those Weak of Heart and Mind, Stop Here

Hi,

For some reason, many of the friends I have made in the past five years do not know me. They may think they know me, I may even think they know me, but they don't. I am not sure why. I just haven't been keen on opening myself up to people. I hang out immensely with these people, and we have lots of great and memorable times together, but I find that my entire personality is just what they have physically observed of me. People don't really know my past, what my life is like (other than school/improv), what my relationship with Lindsey is like.

Here is an example that surprised even me: A few months ago I was sitting and eating with a couple of friends who I had known for a good 2 or 3 years. They were particularly good friends who I hung out with on many many occasions. While sitting with them, it became apparent that they really knew almost nothing about my Workshop experience. It was a big realization that they knew nothing of the program, my experiences, or my stories of a year of my life that was probably the single most formative time of my life.

I don't talk to people about my feelings, I hide when I am sad, I try to only put on a neutral to happy face. Maybe a lesson I've learned is that no one likes an unhappy person. When someone asks if I'm OK, I will almost always say fine or good or great, no matter how I feel. I don't believe that people really want to hear anything else.

This is a weird lesson to have learned. I'd like to believe I've learned otherwise, because its not the healthiest outlook to have. I've been through so much sadness in my life. I've experienced intense periods of depression, moments of despair where I was ready and willing to end it all. I learned to beat a lot of those feelings by embracing sadness as a normal feeling (if its OK to be happy, why shouldn't it be OK to be sad?), by talking about how I feel, and by realizing that life is precious. I always give advice to other people to be open and honest with themselves and others. I quote a book I once read (The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibrian) and tell people that we can only be filled with joy as deep as sorrow cuts into us. I am pretty well versed on how to be open about feelings.

In high school, I was perpetually alone and unhappy. But that's high school, right? So then I went on Workshop. I was always around a really great (at times) group of people. We were constantly open with each other, we shared deep things...I met the most important person in my life. I grew, I learned things about myself, I confronted my parents about deeply disliking them, I learned to love again, I made close friends that wil certainly last a lifetime, I became a new and improved Gil. My whole 18 years before that year were all just a long trail of shit that I could wipe away clean.

And yet, here I am, five years down the road, and I find myself hiding my true self. I show half myself. I show almost nothing to anybody. I don't let people in. Sometimes I don't even know if I'm in anymore.

Why is that? Even my great friends from Workshop have grown distant. I hardly talk to them, and when I do its never like it was back then, its the same as it is with anyone else. I've dabbled in opening up a little to people with mixed results. Sometimes I can feel that another person wants me to tell them more, but I still avoid it.

I am feeling number and number. Something needs to change. I need to start feeling again.

Photo of the Day

This isn't a particularly great picture, but for some sad reason I don't have a lot of pictures of this guy. This guy is a great guy. He was my best friend on MBI, and he continues to be one of my bestest buddies even though we are on opposite coasts. I was scared to go on MBI until I found out he was going, too. He is pretty cute, huh?

Anyway, the reason I have a picture of him is for more than just praise, although I could do that for a long time. The reason is that he relates to my entry today. My entry dealt with the idea of helping people and what I can do. Now my friend here, who is named Zach by the way, had an interesting perspective on this topic. Zach at one point in time tried to change the situation in Darfur, Sudan by getting a petition signed by thousands of students Canada-wide. He proudly sent this petition to the foreign minister to initiate change in government policy. In case you don't know Canadian government policy, nothing has changed. They are as unconcerned with that region of the world as any other rich predominantly white nation. This was a crushing blow to Zach's idea of what he could do to make a change in the world.

This summer, Zach began to challenge people's conception of making change by proposing his own idea of how to truly make a difference. As an individual, what can you do to save a family's life in Darfur? Talking to politicians often is fruitless, and when it isn't, it is still so slow in its avenues that no difference will be made in the necessary time. You could enter politics yourself, but thats well in the future before you are going to be able to change anything of concern. You could send money, but that won't necessarily save a life. So Zach proposed this: Get yourself a gun, AK-47 or the like, fly to Darfur, wait outside an African village, and when that van full of Janjaweed come out, you kill them. In the time that you have made by attacking the would-be killers, at least one family will have had enough time to run away to a refugee camp or the likes. Even if you die, you probably have saved their lives. This is the best and possibly only thing an individual can do to truly affect lives in Darfur today..according to Zach, NOT me.

Zach would argue very honestly about this, and its hard to counter this arguement. My main counter was that I am truly against killing no matter what. Its not OK to go out and kill those Janjaweed, even though they are potential killers themselves. Thats just my humanistic values, though. Its not a good arguement for Zach.

An actual arguement is that as a collective or a movement, you can be part of something larger that can really help. One person can't do a lot, but a solid group can. You can all work together in Sudan to make a difference in many ways other than just killing. And even if you were killing, you'd be way more efficient as a group.

Woah, that was a morbid comment.

Anyway, thats why my idea of being leader of my movement is gaining more and more import in my head. As the leader of a collective I can really make a difference somewhere if I set the movement's sight in that direction.

Here is another story involving Zach:

At camp one year (Zach and I are camp friends originally) Zach was trying to grasp the concept of irony. He would propose all sorts of situations and I would say whether they were ironic or not (i.e. a diabetic dying from being hit by a truck carrying insulin). Anyway, at camp we have fun activities where everyone dresses up and acts out funny situations. This particular night was Pirate Night and everyone was dressed like pirates. I drew on a mustache and had a sword/stick, Zach wore a bandana, sash and eyepatch. Zach and I sat and told stories to kids about swashbuckling and booty. One story Zach was telling involved him stealing booty from me, and as he told the story he grabbed my hand and pulled it towards him (you know, for visual aid to the story). Unfortunately, I was holding my sword/stick in that hand and he pulled it directly into his eye quite hard. He was hurt pretty bad and as he lay in tears in the infirmary, I sat with him. He was still in his bandana, sash, torn pants, and now he had a real eyepatch over his eye. He turned to me and weakly asked, "Gil, is this ironic?" I gently pat his head and nodded, "Yes, Zach. This is definitely ironic."

I Know I Didn't Put The P

Yo,

I saw Constant Gardener yesterday. It was actually a pretty great movie. It dealt with very interesting topics, and for me it brought up the theme of, "What can I do to help?"

This is a recurring theme in my head. The basic idea, which I've written about before so forgive the slight redundancy, is that I want to do something that helps people when I grow up. I want to do a job which will improve people's lives. The ideas for future life choices at this point in time are as such:

1) Become leader of my youth movement (Mazkir Tnua...great title)
2) Drop everything and pursue imrov seriously
3) Grad School for something or other, possible Speech Pathology

Now, from these three, it seems #1 holds the most option of helping people. My movement is part of an international movement which works towards peace and social justice in Israel, among other things. As the head of my movement, I can direct actions, set plans in place, and get involved in international coordinated initiatives. I could even push my movement to get more actively and officially involved in domestic social justice issues, of which there are many.

But #3 also holds a lot of potential. If I were to gain a useful skill, such as Speech Pathology certification, I would be actively helping individuals every day! That seems awesome, right? Its not as large scale as my movement, but it is way more concrete that planning and implementing initiatives and the like. Either this person can talk, or they can't...figure it out!

Unfortunately for me, #2 is very possibly at the top of my list. This option holds the least "help people" potential. It does seem the funnest. I mean, imrov! Its so great, I love doing imrov, imrov is so fulfilling, I never feel like I'm getting enough of imrov! It makes sense to go for it, right?

Here's the thing: To temper the fervor raised inside myself after the Constant Gardener, I also gained an interesting message from an episode of My So Called Life. First of all, let me just say that this show is really fun to watch. It is really well made, and the characters are all really interesting. Anyway, in this most recent episode, Graham (Angela's [Claire Danes] Dad) has a life-shaking event happen. He realizes that although he may be good at his job, its not what he wants to be doing, and he doesn't want to waste his life away. Luckily, his wife realizes this and being his boss, fires him. How touching. The moral is obvious, and its relevant. I do love imrov, and it makes me really happy. Isn't that whats most important overall?

Shit. I hate that two different and equally entertaining and poignant fictional stories are putting me into such a moral paradox!

Anyway, the positive outlook on all this is that I'm still really young, and I have time to dabble in things before making the big leap into a career for quite some time. Thats the lesson I learned from some guy I kinda know who I ran into yesterday and had a short but awkward conversation with. Perhaps the best lessons in life come from real life interactions, and not from watching glowing screens of scripted interactions with prepackaged morals.

That was a kind of hippy ending. Shit.

Laziness Sets In With Ironic Efficiency

Hi,

Well, I decided a while back not to apologize for not writing in my blog, but I'd at least like to explain what's been happening.

Firstly, I got way too sucked into my little video game world. It turns out that the game really is a complex sequel to Chrono Trigger, and as the plot got denser, I got more determined to figure out what the hell was going on. Thats my first explanation.

Secondly, I haven't really been responding to ANY emails or anything. I've been generally abstaining from writing things on my computer I guess. No emails, not blog entries. What happened is that I received an email that I really wanted to respond to, but it was also somewhat of an overwhleming task. So, while I was shying away from responding to this email, I shied away from all others, knowing that if I began one email, I'd inevitably write this email thats been hanging over me. This is a common phenomenon for me, it happens with school work as well sometimes. So in writing this blog entry, I am finally submitting to writing this email. And its a good thing, because in my hiatus from writing, I've received an email from a hurt friend because I didn't respond. Oops. Thats the second reason.

Lastly, I have been super busy hanging out with friends and doing cool things, I didn't really have any time. Thats the last reason. Also, its a lie.

Anyway, thats the low down.

I'd really like this post to be about something other than why I haven't posted so here is a sliver of my life in the past few days:

I started school on Thurday and its pretty fun. I actually only have class on Tuesday and Thursday, which means 4 day weekends! It all depends on McGill's ability to accept Concordia University as a legitimate institute of higher learning.

You see, I took some Linguistics classes at Concordia a few years back, and one of those courses was Phonology. It was a lovely course taught by the wonderful Charles Reiss, and I aced it after happily working away through the semester. When I approached the McGill Linguistics department about this issue a couple years back they seemed dissatisfied with me taking a core Linguistics course at Concordia and wanted me to take it AGAIN!

I kind of didn't respond to this request over the years and now I find myself at the last semester of my time here at McGill. I figure that when I talk to the advisor, I can some how sucker him into letting me have my rightful Concordia credits by appealing to the fact that its my last semester and I'm too busy to fit it in my schedule.

I've got my fingers crossed on this one, I certainly don't want ONE class on Monday Wednesday and Friday. I would definitely want to skip it 75 to 99% of the time.

I'll keep you posted. Hehe...blog pun.