I'm a people

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday about something that Jonathan Foer wrote in his book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It's on the first page that you see when you open the book, and it says "For Nicole, my idea of beautiful". My friend made two good points when she said that that puts a lot of pressure on Nicole, which it does, and that that is what people long to be for someone else, which they do. That conversation made me start thinking about what people are like. I've spent most of my life thinking about that. I don't know why, it's just always fascinated me. When I go to a restaurant or a movie or a basketball game or a flea market or anywhere else, I always watch people because I'm a person and I think I learn a lot from watching other persons be persons. Not in a weird way, just in the way that would be more normal if people were less self-conscious and more curious about the world. When I was more arrogant than I am now, and I'm arrogant now which is sad, I used to people-watch like I was watching Animal Planet or National Geographic, which is to say that I felt like the only real human amongst a whole herd of knuckle-dragging bipeds. I used to look down on people because they loved things and laughed hard and wanted to have kids young and wanted to find a job. I guess I was hostile to those things for a long time because, when I was really young, and I don't remember exactly when so don't ask, I remember seeing my parents laughing really hard with some friends and thinking "what is there to laugh about, all of this goes away". This was pre-anything I've wrestled with up to this point. It honestly was a stand-alone thought that got a grip on me for, well, the next 12 years (I think I was ten or eleven at the time) and I don't know why. I just thought that people that loved and drank dark coffee and laughed hard lost everything. So, I don't think that anymore. What I think now is that there are things that can't be totally explained, like why blue whales have humerus bones which are for arms which they don't have, at least anymore, and like why people get married when it's hard and kids grow up and leave and people get old and die at different times and leave one behind, except there's beauty there that can't be denied, which is to say there is an ache there, which is what I know of beauty. Bertrand Russell, on his death bed, told a reporter that if God did exist, he would ask him why He hadn't made Himself a bit more visible. That's a good question. Sometimes I think there are love atheists, which if that were a word would be aphileists or aeroists or something like that. What I mean is, I think people refuse to love because it won't make itself a bit more visible, and they stomp off into their study and write books about how love is just a power play and that it's all bunk. Anyway.

I've always been interested in constellations. I think the reason is that I read a lot of Greek mythology when I was younger and then again when I was in college, and I was always jealous of the people that were turned into constellations, mostly because I was in dark waters during a portion of college and I wanted to get away and being turned into a constellation sounded like getting away. I realized last week that it's funny that we refer to ourselves as a person, because that implies a singularity and solidarity that no one has. It implies that to me, at least. That's similar to how saying the pronoun "I" sounds strange to me sometimes because I don't know which I I'm talking about. Don't worry, I don't have split personality disorder. Tyler thinks we do but we don't. That was a joke. Another joke is that there are people that think that the Holocaust didn't happen, which would be more funny if they just didn't know except that they are being ignorant and trying to un-remember something horrible that happened so that they can keep socially and physically persecuting Jews. Forget isn't the right word, because forgetting is something that you do when you aren't paying attention. You un-remember on purpose. Anyway, when you think about it, you are really more like a constellation than a star. I hated it, even in third grade, when teachers said things like "you're a star" or "you're really special". I mean I liked it, because everyone likes being told that they are special, it was just so cheesy. If you don't think you like being told you're special, pay attention to how you act when someone exaggerates about how good you are at something or says you did something better than you actually did it. You won't jump as quickly to correct them as you would if they said you were worse at something than you are. You probable won't say anything at all.

The point of all this is simple: we are a lot of things at once. If you mapped yourself out over the course of just a day, much less a year, the image would end up looking more like a constellation than a single point in the sky. I love, and want to love, and I want to know what love is, but I also want to never find it sometimes because of what that will mean. I know that real love and success take hard work and suffering to find and I love that and I hate that because sometimes I want what I want when I want it. I want to be a folk singer, a rap producer, an agent for movie stars and musicians, a poet, a computer programmer, an oil tycoon, a sculptor, a photographer, a sheikh, a professional fighter, a shepherd, and a professional fly fisherman over the course of any given day. I hate things only until I love them again, I talk big, I'm learning to work hard, I don't want to work hard, I feel entitled and I hate that, I'm starting to love the Lord for real and I don't like that sometimes, and I stay up late worried that I'm going to lose myself. I imagine it's roughly the same for you. Every morning, I wake up aware of the fact that I'm not a person, I'm a people, and it reminds me of why I need a big, personal, righteous, slow-to-anger, abounding-in-love, begging-to-intervene Saviour.