Sometimes Life Sucks

What do you do when the person who eases your pain is the one causing it?

Elephants on Parade

As a big guy living on the second floor I try to walk softly in my apartment out of courtesy for the folks below me. But yesterday, I saw a huge BYU banner hanging in their front window. We live a block from the USU campus you dicks. Also I have no respect for a school where you are guaranteed to get a degree if you served a mission. Needless to say, I'm no longer going to think before I step. 

The Talk

Alright kids it's time we had a little talk, about sex. I know some of you are scared of this subject or giggle at the mention of it, but it's time to be adults about it and see it for what it is. Sex is fun, period. It's a fun thing that grownups do to enjoy themselves and relieve stress. People act like sex is this taboo thing we shouldn't talk about. Bullshit, sex is the only reason any of us are here. A big misconception around these parts is that it is this "sacred thing that a husband a wife do to strengthen the bond" blah blah blah, more bullshit. If that were the case people wouldn't be cheating left and right. And on that topic, lets not fool ourselves, cheating is far more prevalent than anyone cares to admit.
Now, I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this post, but I guess I'm curious. Why do we attach so much gravity to sex? It is one of life's greatest pleasures.
Over the past little while a few of my intimate encounters could be classified as, terrible. I don't know if it was because there was some expectation, or because there wasn't. I've gotten enough late night calls and texts from ex-girlfriends questioning their choice in companions  to know that far too many people are having lame sex. If the chemistry isn't there, it just isn't there. You can try all you want, but you can't create it out of nothing. There have been a few people throughout my life that I have had crazy chemistry with, and if it's there you know it.
I'm just having a hard time lately understanding why people are so resistant to letting their guard down and having a little fun. So I guess, go have a fling. Live some life and don't over think it.

Where I Am Now.

I've been keeping this blog or what ever it is for five years now. There's not really anything of much substance here; it's more of a place to vent or to occasionally satiate my need to feel clever. When this all started I was in the process of ending a terrible relationship with myself. I had no idea where I was going to end up, but for the first time in years I could see light on the horizon and I had hope. My life has always been a little atypical, but the last five years have been even more so. I have traveled to amazing places, seen indescribable things, and met wildly interesting people. I've fallen in love a couple of times, fallen into the wrong bed a couple of times, and discovered what real friendship is.
But sometimes I forget, I forget the spark that started it all. I forget the sense of wonder and excitement of starting a journey without knowing the path ahead. So sometimes I go back and read my very first post here, the one that started it all. In it I captured my excitement and hopes for changing my life, it brought me to where I am now. A little while back I was talking to Bryan about where we (he and I, and our peers) were at in our lives. I told him that the big mistake that people make, the rut we fall into, is to wait for things to happen in our lives. We wait for things to come along, or for the right time. We view our lives as a series of destinations. When the kids are out of the house I'll go back to school. Someday I'll start my our business. When this happens I'll... When the time is right... We sit back and we wait for life to arrive. But the fact is, there is only one destination in life, death. We are born, we live, and then we die. There is no destination in the middle. We like to think there is. And this is the idea I was conveying to Bryan. The reason I feel lucky about my life and why I think it is so much better than my peers. I still have room above and ahead of me. Most of my friends/peers have peaked in their lives. They have the best job they are likely to ever have and make as much money as they ever will. They've had the kids and bought the house, and this is about as good as it's ever going to get.
I forget sometimes that I have this crazy interesting life and that the best parts are still ahead of me.

Today

It's no great secret that I despise religion. I believe that it is the truest evil on this planet, and today I'm going to pick on the mormons. So if you're a mo you better stop reading now if you want to keep liking me. And on a side note, since this is MY blog I don't feel that I should censor myself or apologize for anything I feel or say here.
On this day in 1857 a bunch of mo's dressed up as Paiute Indians, attacked and slaughtered 130 innocent people passing through Utah on a wagon train from Arkansas heading to Cali. There are a lot of excuses offered giving motive, but the bottom line is the mo's finally felt they were in a position to turn the tables on their former persecutors in Missouri. By the way, Missouri is the next state up from Arkansas, which in those days may as well been on the other end of the country. The wagon train was fairly wealthy with a lot of livestock and Brother Brigham  wanted those cattle. They all figured that if they dressed up like Indians they could get away with it. After five days a guy approached the wagon train in his own cloths and with a white flag of truce and said he'd struck a deal with the Indians (the 2 that had wondered over to see what was going on), and if they would leave their cattle, weapons and all belongings behind they would be safely escorted to Cedar City by the mormon militia. The wagon train agreed. First thing the mo's did was round up all the kids under 8 because they were "too young to tell tales", this also happens to be the momo's age of accountability, put them in a wagon and send them away. Then they marched everyone else down the road a mile and slaughtered them in cold blood. The mo's then pilfered the spoils. It is said that some of the young survives would even spot women wearing their mothers dresses after that.
A year after the Mountain Meadow Massacre an Army regiment was sent to investigate. They found the bodies still laying on the ground a year later. They buried the bodies and erected a memorial. Shortly after they left Brother Brigham himself traveled down to the site. He had his men tear down the memorial and said,"Vengeance was mine and I took a little."
Now, I will not respond to any comments on this post. There is no explanation, no excuse, no justification for this event. Trying to pick apart semantics, or argue over fine details takes away from the gravity of this atrocity. Few mo's even know what happened, most are brought up with a vague, poorly painted lie. If you want to make excuses or quibble over details go ahead, but you're just condoning these actions if you do.
All this said, I am declaring this day my personal Religion Free Day. Most days I'm willing to bite my lip and let shit slide, but not today. From now on this will be my day free from peoples religious bullshit. Anyone who brings religion or faith, in or anywhere near my life in any way, will be removed from it. I will forget I know you and go on with my life happier for it.

I'll Try

I think I might try to give this blogging thing some more serious attention. No promises, but it occurs to me that it's a good way to distance my mind from the dry math and physics problems that I spend countless hours crunching.
A while back, after relating some mishap or wackiness I came across on a dating site, my friend Bryan suggested I keep a blog of the crazy I come across on the dating sites. I don't know if I'll blog exclusively about that or not, probable not, but some of those stories will be mixed in. And there are some doozies. If you're 35, non-Mo and trying to date in Utah, you might as well hang a two day old dead fish around your neck and drive a windowless van because people are going to treat you like you do anyway.
Chances are I'll keep this up for the next couple of days and then it'll be back to a post every other year or so. I guess that's all I've got for now, it's late, I'm fried and I have to do it all again tomorrow. Time to go watch some Star Trek and crash. Kirk out.

I know I don't post often, and I kind of doubt that anyone reads the few that I do. But I feel like I need to say something about my former school of higher learning and my hometown. What a joke they both are. God, Dixie is such a huge joke! I always kind of knew it, but it wasn't until I started spending my days on a real campus that it really settled in. I'm sitting in classes being taught my professors who work on projects for NASA. I finally go to a school where I'm not embarrassed to try and explain what the mascot is.
I always knew I'd be happier when I got out of St. George, but it took moving away to realize what a shithole it truly is. In all my travels, and I've been around, the worse people I've come across are in southern Utah. St. George is the most pretentious, rude, vapid place I've ever been. Nowhere else have I seen people who made 30K a year and are on food-stamps,  yet own two homes, three plus vehicles and take three week Hawaiian vacations.
The first two weeks I was here, I was freaked out by how nice everyone was. I finally realized that there isn't an abundance of nice here, I'm just used to how shitty everyone in St. George is. I also realize that I'm probably a little shitty too being from St. George. But at least I know that and knowing is half the battle.

Perhaps there is a poet lost inside of me. But if there is, he lacks the ability to make manifest the gravity of my thoughts with any kind of eloquence. Instead I am content with the title of philosopher, knowing all to well that the word really means, 'fool, pondering a world always out of reach'.

Moving on.

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I’m a little odd, or different. I have spent most of my life trying to conform to what ever is considered normal and failing at it. I have always had a hard time fitting in, and if it weren’t for a propensity for situational assessment, I probably would have been incapable of having a social life. With this conclusion of being an oddity came the illation (not elation, not the same look it up) that I’m ok with it, in fact I prefer it. I spend far too much of my present dwelling on a past filled with self-doubt that was fueled by my unfortunate choices in companionship. I’ve realized that my life has been filled with friends and lovers who saw me for what they thought I could be and not what I am. People who thought they could help me to be better, when in fact their idea of better actually meant, “more like them”. My life has been a waiting room for those who would use it as a temporary distraction until their real life showed up. Then they would wipe their feet and merrily skip off forgetting to shut the door. I’m tired of twelve am phone calls and chat conversations full of regret and “what ifs” from people who realized my value far too late. I wish I had been able in my youth to embrace my quirkiness, maybe if I’d grown up in a community with less bigotry and judgment I would have. But now that I have embraced it, I’m going to run with it. I enjoy my eclectic, weird, even possibly eccentric personality.  To any that I wasn’t good enough for in the past, I’m sure as hell not good enough for you now. Wait… Strike that, reverse it.  Kirk out.

Undeclared

A new semester is upon us and it's feeling a lot like last semester, bla and boring. It's not like there's not plenty of homework to keep me busy; this is one of the more homework heavy semesters I've had. I just don't seem to care about doing it. If I'm already feeling this way two weeks in, it's going to be a miserable one. I think it's time for a break. I've got a lot of things I want to do before I die and it's occurred to me that some of them have to me done in a graduated order. Otherwise, realizing some will negate the possibility of others. So I think it may be time for another adventure. I have my passport and thanks to a combination of budgeting and really good investing (despite my complete ignorance of how that stuff works) I think I have enough in savings to finance an adventure. I don't relish the idea of taking a semester off and thus prolonging the completion date of this experiment I've been conducting the last three years. However, at this point, I've already toyed with the idea of terminating the whole thing, forgetting about doing the "school thing" and just going back to work. And that will not get me where I want to go. Ahh, it seems that I am once again at a cross roads. Things were much simpler last semester when I could put off decision making until this semester, but now that time is here.

So.

Last week was my birthday and no one remembered. Well, aside from family, one person remembered. But not the one I was hoping for. After the big fuss she made last year when i didn't tell her about it, I figured that she would remember this year. But she didn't.

Music to my ears.

Possibly the coolest thing I've had a woman say to me. "Hey, do you want to go grab a beer?"

Is It Possible That I'm Just An Idiot?

I have found myself once again crazy about someone who cannot or will not return my affections. This has become so common a pattern in my attempts at making a love connection, that it's not even sad anymore. It's more like hilariously tragic.
The pattern goes exactly like this:
We meet and hit it off instantly.
We get along great and are very comfortable with each other, finding lots to converse about.
We begin to REALLY like each other.
Enough time passes for her to realize that I am actually as nice a guy as I seem to be (apparently that is rare).

Then it occurs to her that nice guys are suppose to finish last, those are just the rules, she didn't make them up, but they must be followed. And then we have the conversation where she explains that she's not done figuring herself out yet. She's not done having fun or ready to commit to one person.
BUT, She also explains that I am so amazing and so special to her, she can't bare the idea of not having me in her life. And with that, I am cast in role of best guy friend.
She then proceeds to date every shithead in site all the while saying to me, "I can't believe you haven't found someone, you're such a great guy."
This has happened to me no less than half a dozen times. Needless to say, I am angry at the entire female gender. Ladies, I really wish you would get together as a group and decide who among you is willing to welcome me in from the wasteland known as the "friend zone".

I refuse to be governed by conformity.

So, a funny thing happened to me today. For about half an hour (maybe forty-five minutes) I forgot who I was.
Let me preface this story by saying, "I hate glassware!" I am a big guy, who is clumsy. I like my kitchenware durable.
So, after a trip to the state owned store of sin , I was in search of wine glasses. At the dollar store the glasses were too cheap. At Target (a.k.a.Wal-mart plus) they were too expensive. As I was looking at a set of 4 glasses for $15.95-ish, it suddenly dawned on me, "Why am I looking at a special glass to drink wine out of?" I am Ian Owens! Since when do I conform? Why would wine taste any different from a wine glass than it would from a mason jar? Plus a mason jar is so much more my style.

Sunlight

There was once a troll named Ugh. He was like most trolls, he lived in a world that was always dark. He liked it that way; Always hidden away from the world. He did what trolls do. He went about his daily affairs ignoring the light of day, always keeping his eyes on the ground. Until one day, while munching on his midday grub, he caught out out of the corner of his eye, a ray of sunshine casting a golden beam of light on a lone wildflower. For the first time in Ugh's life he saw pure beauty. He was perplexed by this singular flower that could grow between the thorns of roses and stand above the tangles of the honeysuckle. In the days to follow Ugh found himself returning to that spot to try and catch a glimpse of the majesty of a world he dared not dream of. Over time Ugh began to visit the meadow that was home to the wildflower less and less, because he knew that the flower belonged to a world that was not his. After a while Ugh began to forget about the wildflower. And then, one day after returning home from a day of toil, he found a crack in the wall. The crack let in a tiny blade of light that was shining in on a small wildflower.

AAAAAGGEeerrrr....

This is one of those times when my brain is screaming at me, and I know the the best way to calm it, is to type type type type type type type. But my house really smells terrible right now, and I've narrowed it down to the fridge. So my evening is probably going to be spent on that.

Coming soon,

I promise. I have a metric ton of stuff on my mind I need to get out because it's starting to make my sulci itch. So pretty soon you'll either get one big all encompassing hodgepodge of "what the Hell?", or you'll get a bunch of little ones.

update?

Alright, it's been a while since I posted and I'm stuck at work with nothing to do and feeling a little antsy. So does your brain ever get all filled up with important stuff and you get that feeling like you just want to run to burn off the stress? I feel like that some times, but then I remember that I'm an out of shape lard ass and that I'd only make it about 300 feet before I was worn out and had to stop for a donut break.

Here's my problem, I feel like things are not happening fast enough. I have sort of a plan and everything, but right now it's going to take about five years to get to where I want to be and I want to be there now. To top it off, summer break is killing me, I'm not getting anything done, and can't really. I guess I'm making money (which apparently is a key part of the plan) but it still feels like I'm standing still.

A younger version of myself would be super pissed at me right now, but I'm going to say this anyway. I can't wait for summer to be over and for school to start.

It is very possible that at some point in time I will resume posting my very profound thoughts here. Stay tuned.

I remember this place. This is where I used to write things.