thepensivepumpkin.com

I love poetry.

I used to hate it in high school when we were forced to write it. You can’t force imagination without a little bit of inspiration.
I’ve written some poems both for school and also years after finishing school. I recall only one relatively good one I wrote for my French 12 class.. I wish I still had it… it was about two lovers and it had a twist: murder. It kinda sucks that I don’t have that anymore. Not that it was amazing or anything, but it just came with such ease that I just really enjoyed writing it.

Whenever I travelled after I had graduated from high school, whether it was just a weekend long thing, or a three and a half month thing, I kept a diary of my inner most thoughts, I don’t recall if I wrote any poems though.. mostly just a diary of thoughts, feelings, events. Pretty standard, but still very personal. I did write some poetry, mostly in the form of songs, when I got back from travelling. I find that whenever I’m feeling creative a melancholy, somber side of my creativity emerges. A friend once said she only wrote on her journal when she was sad, angry, or frustrated. So I started to wonder whether the great poets, novelists and songwriters of the world are depressed first, then write about it…or write about it first and then become depressed as a result of their imaginations tricking them into thinking they are sad… hmmm

In this lies the reason for the love/hate rather than just plain love relationship. It’s so easy to come up with a sad story, in my opinion, which is why I don’t generally like sad, dramatic films or books. But then I guess comedy writers maybe wish they could write drama and finally have a shot at winning an Oscar. I don’t know. Anyways..

For instance, I was thinking back at some of my favourite pictures I have taken over the years and was reminded of one I took when I was in grade 10
..and this came to me:

Tonight, like so many nights, I turn my pillow over– this side is wet;
You don’t get it, maybe you never will. Maybe you will, just not yet.

Maybe you don’t hear, maybe you don’t want to hear, maybe you ignore.
But in spite of your deafness I hush my uneven breaths because it’s you I adore.

Maybe you don’t see, maybe you don’t want to see, maybe you brush it off.
But in spite of your blindness I wipe the tears away because it’s you I love.

If you could see what I feel, if you could feel what I see,
Maybe you would notice when I cry while you sleep.

I hate poetry.

I have this theory that if I stopped doing what I do every day other people’s lives would be a complete mess both literally and figuratively. I am putting into effect starting yesterday. So far the world seems unaware but that shouldn’t last long.

I’m reading The Alchemist (El Alquimista) a book about following yours dreams, in essence, but it is so much more than that.
I love when I’m finished reading a book and I notice I have dog eared tones of pages along the way. It means certain parts of it made a big enough impact on me that I want to go back and reread those pages to remind myself of their brilliance. If you know me, you know that it’s very hard for me to get into a book unless it speaks to me in a subtle language where interpretation is only limited by imagination and limitless with an open mind. The stranger and more far fetched the better. A great example is my favourite book of all time (so far), The Celestine Prophecy; to most a simple work of fiction; to me, so much more.

Anyways, I want to share some excerpts from The Alchemist.

What the boy felt at that moment was that he was in the presence of the only woman in his life, and that, with no need for words, she recognized the same thing. He was more certain of it than of anything in the world. He had been told by his parents and grandparents that he must fall in love and really know a person before becoming committed. But maybe people who felt that way had never learned the universal language. Because, when you know that language, it’s easy to understand that someone in the world awaits you, whether it’s in the middle of the desert or in some great city. And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one’s dreams would have no meaning.

“My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in serach of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”

“Every second of the search is an encounter with God,” the boy told his heart. “When I have been truly searching for my treasure, every day has been luminous, because I’ve known that every house was a part of the dream that I would find it. When I have been truly searching for my treasure, I’ve discovered things along the way that I never would have seen had I not had the courage to try things that seemed impossible for a shepherd to achieve.”

So his heart was quiet for an entire afternoon. That night, the boy slept deeply, and, when he awoke, his heart began to tell him things that came from the Soul of the World. It said that all people who are happy have God within them. And that happiness could be found in a grain of sand from the desert, as the alchemist had said. Because a grain of sand is a moment of creation, and the universe has taken millions of years to create it. “Everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him,” his heart said. “We, people’s hearts, seldom say much about those treasures, because people no longer want to go in search of them. We speak of them only to children. Later, we simply let life proceed, in its own direction, toward its own fate. But, unfortunately, very few follow the path laid out for them-the path to their destinies, and to happiness. Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.

“So, we, their hearts, speak more and more softly. We never stop speaking out, but we begin to hope that our words won’t be heard: we don’t want people to suffer because they don’t follow their hearts.”

“Why don’t people’s hearts tell them to continue to follow their dreams?” the boy asked the alchemist.

“Because that’s what makes a heart suffer most, and hearts don’t like to suffer.”

I’m sitting at home, burning incense and listening to Shpongle. I meditated today for the first time since Heather and I had our last meditation class back in September…I had forgotten how great I feel after taking just a few minutes to sit quietly and contemplate. Can’t work today due to the rain..I’m looking for a landscaping/gardening job. I think it will suit me better than the painting I’m currently doing. The work itself is alright I guess, I just don’t like the piece work system…I thought I might, but now I know that I don’t really. Maybe I just need to get used to it? Maybe it will be good to stick with it for the summer..but I know that if I can get something landscaping, especially with a sustainable, organic company, then I will definitely take it.

Check out this article from the New York Times.

Psychedelic therapy hits mainstream media ! “subjects described their egos and bodies vanishing as they felt part of
some larger state of consciousness in which their personal worries and
insecurities vanished”.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/science/12psychedelics.html?ref=todayspaper

About time, eh?

Ever since Heather told me this great story told to her class at the Moon Course in Guatemala (http://www.laspiramidesdelka.com/) I have not been able to stop thinking about Karma. I wont go into the story because I don’t remember the details very clearly and Heather is not picking up her phone at the moment.

Just so we are clear on what Karma is:

Karma is a concept in Hinduism which explains causality through a system where beneficial effects are derived from past beneficial actions and harmful effects from past harmful actions, creating a system of actions and reactions throughout a souls’s reincarnated lives forming a cycle of rebirth. The causality is said to be applicable not only to the material world but also to our thoughts, words, actions and actions that other do under our instructions. When the cycle of rebirth comes to an end, a person is said to have attained moksha, or salvation from samsara, in other words, they are freed from the cycle of rebirth.

Thank you wikipedia.

Heather gave me a pretty brief description of the course and it inspired me like nothing else has inspired me in a while, not since Shambhala last August or since reading The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield. If you have not read this book I highly recommend it…even if you don’t believe a word of it you’ll at least appreciate the edge-of-your-seat, page-turning aspect of the story.

Anyways, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I may not be staying in Victoria for much longer… exactly a year from this month I will graduate with a B.A. in Psychology and my life will finally begin.

Just 4 months minus 1 day until Shambhala 2010… I can’t help but get giddy.

I was inspired yesterday during my French exam. Continuing on this theme of controvery I seem to have started, I will now write here some of the same ideas I expressed on my exam. Basically we had to read an article in a really cool Quebecois magazine called L’actualité, that dealt with homosexual child prostitution in Lebanon. The article is called “Quand le Liban fait la pute” by Katia Jarjoura p. 50 on the March 15th edition. Most of the articles on the magazine can be found online, but for some reason I can’t find this one. The question I had to answer for my essay was if I believed, like journalist Souhaib Ayyoub had suggested in the article, that religious oppression of sex had something to do with this problem…

So here is a quick translation/summary of the article:

“I was sixteen the first time,” says Marwan, a young man who with his appeal, could easily pass for a rock star in America. He explains that he was in Tripoli driving in a car with his friends when they introduced him to a Saudi business man. He wanted Marwan to give him a blowjob. At first Marwan refused but he was so poor and so desperate that he ended up accepting. He made $250 US dollars and hasn’t stopped since.  In this town about 80 km north of the capital of Beruth, his story is not a unique one. According to him, around 50% of the people in Tripoli are paid for sexual services.

Thanks to Marwan and his friends’ good looks they have had some very high paying customers, including religious men, family men, business men, and even princes. Interestingly enough, the vast majority of their customers come from Saudi Arabia, a land of strict religious beliefs, of incredible gender segregation and inequality where women can show nothing but their eyes. They say that for the most part they are treated kindly; they have sex, get paid, and leave. They make anywhere between $500 to $2500 US depending on the social status of the client. This is five times more than the average Lebanese income of $300 per month.

The origin of this vicious cycle these kids are trapped in is of course poverty and misery. One boy was arrested after hitting a client who was trying to abuse him. Of course in jail, his cover stories include drugs or theft, because if he admitted to being a prostitute he would undoubtedly be killed. “Prostitution is taboo in Islam,” says Ayyoub. He wrote an article about “sexual deviance” and religious oppression for which he was publicly denounced, sheiks ridiculed him during sermons, etc. He argues that the gender segregation and the unyielding religious fundamentalism is what creates in the youth a boiling desire to escape and rebel.

Well, if you know me at all, I think you know what my opinion is on this one. I strongly agree that, yes, religious oppression has a lot to do with this “sexual deviance.” I hate calling it that, but they called it that in the article. To me sexual deviance refers to both the act of paying for sex/being payed for sex and homosexuality..which is why I don’t like it. I highly doubt this is what the author intended by “sexual deviance” though, or at least I hope.

Anyways, in my exam I compared this situation with the whole child molestation issue with the Catholic church. It has a lot of the same components: repression of sexual desires and oppression by the church..really just the whole idea of making sex taboo just baffles me. Violence is cool, whatever, but sex… dear God save our souls from such a nasty sinful act!! It really all just boils down to the most basic concept of human psychology: people want to do what they are not allowed to do! You’d think we would have gotten the hint by now. We all have an innate psychological need for autonomy, competence and relatedness. When religion (or parents!) tries to take away two of these fundamental needs each and every human being on this earth possess, they are going to rebel. Just like you take action when someone steals something from you or when someone offends you or the ones you love, you are going to REACT if someone takes away your freedom and/or stops you from fulfilling your need for human contact.

Let me give you a very simple example to make this as clear as possible: when you are 14 or 15 you are not allowed to drink…so you seek it out, you get way too drunk because you have absolutely no idea of how it will affect you, your parents have never given you an explanation other than “it’s bad for you, it makes you do stupid things.” Well…that sounds like quite a thrill to me! So you get absolutely plastered. You are then punished for it (I’m  not going to get into how incredibly ineffective punishment is right now… that will be a whole other entry) and just find more sneaky ways to do it. Now lets take sex (and I’m talking about consensual sex right now). Again, you are 14 or 15 and your parents and your religion have always told you sex is an act of the devil. Jesus, Mary and Joseph..you’re going to hell for this shit! Television shows and films are rated 18A for sexual content but PG  when Rambo decapitates people left, right, and centre. Messages that sex is evil are bombarded into your head faster than Rambo’s AK47 can splatter 100 Vietnamese prisoners’ guts all over your TV screen. Of course you’re going to want to know what this “sex” thing is all about, but since you know absolutely nothing about it because no one has ever talked to you about it you’ll probably end up pregnant or with a nice little STI. Good times!

Something is very wrong with this picture. I suppose it works for the porn industry though…they make a killing out of the taboo. If sex weren’t a taboo the porn industry would not exist.

I have a point about prostitution, I promise.

Homosexuality is a taboo in Islam. But not only in Islam, I know in Paraguay, where Catholicism reigns supreme, basically anything to do with sex, whether homosexual or heterosexual, is not spoken of. People are taught to be ashamed of their sexual desires, especially if they are directed towards a member of the same sex. Much like not being allowed to have a drink with dinner, a safe controlled environment where you can experiment with alcohol’s effects, harbouring feelings of shame and guilt surrounding sex will only make people rebel and fight back for their freedom of expression. Do you think that if these rich businessmen and these clergymen hadn’t been made to think that homosexuality is a thing of the devil and that sex will make you burn in hell they would be releasing their frustrations on harmless little boys? Of course not! They would know that what they are feeling is normal, that people are different and that God loves everyone equally, that everybody deserves to be happy. They would instead find a consensual and unpaid partner their own age (and not easy, powerless targets like children) and practice safe sex because they would be educated about it since it wouldn’t be taboo! So simple! Yet so complicated.

It’s frustrating. It makes me want to bitch slap some people and tell them to just open up their minds…to free their minds from societal pressures which are so often detrimental to our mental health and well being. To stop being brainwashed by texts written thousands and thousands of years ago that have been translated so many times by so many different people all with their own little brainwashed ideas of what God supposedly wants.

I’ll leave you with the last paragraph of the article.

“All the money I make I end up spending right away. I can’t keep this dirty money, it’s embarrassing. If I could still dream today, I would wish for everyone to forget me, and start back at zero.”- Marwan.

The more I think about it, the more I believe it’s true that women will never rule the world. This isn’t a good or bad thing necessarily, but you be the judge.

Generally, simple and straightforward are the ingredients for success in sales pitches, computer programs, research hypotheses, goal scoring techniques (just shoot on goal!). Much like that, our world is a pretty simple place. Get a job, make money, pay the bills, have children, make more money, drive a nice car, make some more money.

Men are very simple creatures; women are…simply not.

Men rule basically every aspect of human life: multi-billion dollar corporations, law firms, professional sports, households, nations… why are there no female leaders in the world? If there were to be a female leader, why would she never start a war? Because starting a war is simple. The 0.01% of a country (the “bad” guys) are doing something you don’t like, they have something you want or they’re just better than you and you can’t stand it, so you wipe out the whole place. What the heck, lets keep it simple. A woman’s mind is much too complicated for such simple reasoning. A curse? Or a blessing in disguise? For a woman there is no simple solution. There are too many variables to take into account, too many people’s differing points of view, too many people’s feelings, too many people’s lives.

Women will never rule the world because women feel others’ pain, others’ struggles, others’ hunger, thirst, sadness, shame, love, joy…

If a woman ruled a nation there would be no hope for that nation as an economic, military, or otherwise competitive power. These things require a certain level of detachment that women simply cannot process. After Canada beat the USA in the gold medal game at the Olympics a friend at work told me how she said she felt bad for the US players and her dad’s response was “Don’t, they’re all millionaires.” What does being a millionaire have to do with feelings of incompetence and failure? Nothing. Or maybe it does, maybe the answer is too simple for me to grasp.

Empathy is why women will never rule the world.

Note: These are obviously big generalizations, please don’t get offended.

I’m on my last year and a half of completing my undergraduate degree with a major in Psychology and a minor in French. I was lucky to know right of the start, in grade 12 before I even applied to any universities, that I wanted to do Psychology. It’s funny, my “Understanding Motivation” psyc professor said to us yesterday in lecture that there are two reasons why students decide to follow psychology: 1. to fix something about themselves and/or 2. to save the world.

All 18 of us in our small, intimate 4th year class thought it was hilarious. “It’s funny ’cause it’s true” kinda thing. In the class we’ve been looking at different aspects, theories and types of motivation. Yesterday’s topic was on the Terror Management Theory (TMT). Basically what this theory proposes is that since we as humans are the only animals who know we are going to eventually die, we develop mechanisms to deal with it. We looked at a study where students were primed into thinking about their deaths by being asked a question like “Write the first thing that comes to mind when you think about your death.” Another group of students, the control group (the group that isn’t manipulated) got a somewhat similar question but not about death: “Write the first thing that comes to mind when you think about dental pain.” Once this bit was over they measured how each person reacted to a high risk situation. They found that those who had high self-esteem and were primed to think about their death  (high mortality salience) were significantly more likely to engage in high-risk behaviour than those who were exposed to the dental pain condition.

I forget if this was part of the same experiment or not, but it has also been found that when we are reminded of our mortality, we tend to act defensively. That is, we tend to protect our values and worldviews and reject others. A great example given in class was September 11th. When people get scared they seek stability and conservatism. George W. Bush got re-elected in 2005 (?) because Americans were scared a bomb would drop on them at any second unless they were properly protected by shutting out and rejecting anything to do with the Middle East, including American citizens who had nothing to do with the attacks but happened to be of Middle Eastern descent. Basically, we fear and reject what we don’t know or don’t understand because it  poses a threat.

Anyways, the TMT tries to make sense of human behaviour based on this constant, nagging fear we have of dying.You can people do pretty much anything if you instill fear into them.

It really got me thinking about how different the world might be if we didn’t have this tendency to reject the “other” when faced with fear. I guess the easiest way would be to look at the animal kingdom… but that doesn’t seem sufficient to me. Animals aren’t blessed (or cursed??) with the ability to reason, so I think that would be a bad comparison. Our professor suggested we look at individuals with a disability that makes them not aware of their eminent death. Of course there’s been little to no research on this. My guess would be that if someone has that kind of disability they are also very handicapped in other brain functions so it might be hard to really discern the root of the problem. It would be extremely difficult to find someone with such a tiny rupture of such a specific nerve or brain region that only handicapped the awareness of death and nothing else. Any ideas?

This theory can be applied to everyday life. For example, people who are primed with fear of death are more likely to say they dislike a modern (abstract) piece of art, since an abstract painting holds no evident meaning. Like I mentioned before, when we fear for our lives we reject anything that we don’t understand, that holds no meaning to us.

Anyways, I find the TMT fascinating I’m such a nerd. If you’re interested in looking at the studies I briefly mentioned they are:

Play it safe or go for the gold? A terror management perspective on self-enhancement and self-protective motives in risky decision making by Mark J. Landau & J. Greenberg

Windows into nothingness: Terror management, meaninglessness, and negative reactions to modern art by Mark J. Landau

So here I am in Nelson, BC hanging out with the Neufeld-Cummings after spending a long 12hr bus ride from Vancouver. It was pretty cool being in Van during the Olympics…downtown was insane. There were so many people decked out in their Olympic wear and you literally could not walk a block without seeing at least one cop, which worked out well for us since we had no idea where we were going so they served us well as guides.

Our first night in Nelson, which also happened to be Valentine’s Day, Yannick’s mom (Millie) made a delicious dinner. Elsa, Yannick’s younger sister and her boyfriend Mitch were also here to enjoy the special occasion. We had chicken marinated in rum and cinnamon, which Bobby (Yannick’s dad) put on the grill, some wild rice with lots of goodies in it…like avocado, pineapple, and some other delights. Then for dessert we had an amazing homemade cheesecake made by Millie and decorated by Elsa.

Yannick and his kitty Mittens are finally reunited…he’s super giddy. She’s adorable, but that doesn’t change the fact that she is a conniving feline. Mary on the other hand, the hilarious sausage dog, is hilarious and not a feline and therefore better simply by virtue of being a dog. As soon as I go over to pet her or just get near she’ll shoot up and grab her tennis ball to try to get me to play fetch with her. She’s so dumb, I love it.

We went climbing last night here at the local gym, Gravity. After seeing gyms like Stelly’s, Crag-X in Victoria, and Cliffhanger in Vancouver, Gravity is…old and overpriced? The really neat thing about it though is that you can climb up an overhanging wall, across the roof and down another wall on the other side of the gym. Yannick did one way and fell about 3/4 down on the way back. No big deal. Piece of cake.

My main complaint about the gym though is that it’s really dark… especially the bouldering area. The holds are also very different from the holds I’m used to at Stelly’s and the climbs just seem harder than at Stelly’s. This is a good thing though because it will help me improve and will also help me be a more versatile climber. Climbing at just one gym all the time is kind of like driving only automatic… those who can drive standard can drive any car in the world, those who can only drive automatic are much more limited.

One thing that I feel I really have to do while I’m here is go snowboarding. I haven’t gone since Christmas break two or three years ago.. I forget exactly when it was, but it feels like forever ago. But we’ll see, it’s so expensive and I’ll be broke as hell when I get home and I get a $0 paycheque. Should be good times.

Yannick’s chopping off his gorgeous brown locks today

BOO.