let's stumble towards success and pack some snacks for little breaks

I was talking to my boss yesterday about how my friends tend to be older than me. I've always known this was a trend, but I didn't really realize until I was explaining it to her how particularly true it is right now. I still have a few friends my own age who live elsewhere, but not here. I have two Seattle-area friends who are 26 and two who are 29, and all the rest I can think of are in their 30s or older.

I made a graph a few years ago of the ages of my LJ friendslist and hypothesized that the age I would get along with best was around 30, but that social circumstances had led to my befriending the upper end of my own cohort and the lower end of my mom's. I'm not sure if that's entirely true, but current evidence certainly supports the part about me liking people in their 30s. I think that's how old most of my puzzle, yuppie-nerd, and poly-kink friends are, which is most of my friends. This might be why I didn't make many close friends in college--I had a lot of acquaintances, but the only person from Clark I connected with and felt comfortable around (and the only person I've really stayed in touch with since graduation) is Gerry, who's in his 40s. People my age tend to bewilder me. They're always texting right there in front of me while we're hanging out, and they never say what they mean, and there's so much drama. I realize that's a generalization--as I said, I do have friends my age elsewhere--but that was pretty much what college felt like for me socially.

There's also this distressing pattern wherein I have a friend who I believe to be close to me, and who behaves like we're close, and then out of the blue completely cuts me off and refuses to respond to my attempts to contact them. This has happened four times now with people who were important to me. I realize that the common denominator there is me, and believe me when I say I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I did and how to prevent it happening again, or at least predict when it's going to happen (and if you have any theories, by all means lay them on me). But they've also all been around college age. Four is not a sufficient sample size to draw conclusions, but it's enough to make me pretty much okay with not seeking out younger friends right now.

Even if my older friends do always tease me for being a baby. It's a cross I must bear.

Ever since Kate moved out, I've been wanting to get one of those big pillows with arms and turn the other bed into a couch. I don't have the time or money to go out and buy a pillow like that, but as fate would have it, I spotted one in the trash can by the stairwell a few days ago.

( Of course, it looked like this. )

I rescued it, dug a needle and thread out of my random-crap drawer, and got to work.

( Ta-da! )

We've talked about self-efficacy a lot in my social psych class. At first glance, it seems like an unnecessary synonym for self-esteem, but the more I think about it with regards to my own life, the more I see the difference. It's one thing to assure myself that I'm good enough; it's another thing entirely to do things well and feel capable because I did them well.

I think that's why abstract, pointless things like honors designations and good grades don't really make me feel good about myself. I mean, they do to some extent, but it's mostly because I know they should. Something little like this, though, finding a pillow in the trash and fixing it--not perfectly, perhaps, and I hope the textiles-inclined among my flist don't look too closely at those seams--that kind of pride feels more real, more honest.

( I think I've managed to put my thoughts into words this time. )

This, by the way, is why I love my UU church: we can talk about things like this, and hear other people's thoughts and opinions, and no one has to be afraid to express themselves because of the way they're supposed to think.

I had a conversation earlier today with Jeanette about homosexuality, stem cell research and abortion. I think she's very confused about these issues- she's an intelligent person, but she wants to reconcile common sense with the Mormon church, and there's just no way I can see for that to happen.

I wonder how many people like her are out there, with a deeply religious background and beliefs, but an open and reasonable attitude. The thing is, the ones who are open-minded don't press their beliefs on others, so the ones that we really see in society are the rude ones who won't shut up. I know they're not all like that, but I honestly have no clue what the statistics are. I try to picture being in their shoes- growing up without a single doubt about something, and then realizing that maybe things aren't as black and white as they can seem if you think about them the easy way. What beliefs do I hold, that could be questioned if I looked at them differently? I'm not religious at all- I wasn't raised to be, and now that I'm old enough to look at more than one viewpoint and listen to different people, I honestly don't feel the need to be... although I'm beginning to understand, in the most pail-from-the-ocean way, why other people do. I see their community, the way they all work toward a common goal through common principles, and I understand both the attraction to join and the reluctance to leave. Conversely, and less obviously, there is the inner spirituality, the kind that tends to recoil from church and from other people's doubt. This has more to do with security, I think. People want certainty, safety, and (perhaps most important of all) meaning. They don't want to think that they don't matter. Religion, and to an extent spirituality, is there so that people can focus on possibilities- the possibility of heaven and hell, of self-actualization, of species-wide solidarity. I think there's more to inner spirituality than that, because it involves a lot more meditation and thought, versus the group mentality of organized religion, but it all still serves the same purpose, and that is providing purpose. Which is perfectly okay, as long as it doesn't force itself into laws and science and other people, because there are too many religions out there for that to resolve itself peacefully. When religion really is there to make people feel better about themselves and their lives, and when it's personal instead of an outer statement, I'm all for it.

Maybe Jeanette will be able to develop her own creed, a belief structure through which she can combine fact and religion in a way so as to satisfy herself, intellectually and spiritually. I wish her luck. I wish luck to all the Jeanettes, all the people out there who just aren't sure. I hope they figure it out, because no matter how much I wish I could give them my own confidence, I can't. No one can except themselves.

Darrell Phillips, the Penn Valley Physical Education Department Fitness Center Coordinator (according to his business card) told me yesterday to call him between nine and noon today to get an answer on the membership thing. I called him, got his machine, decided to quit playing games and trotted right on into his office.

Turns out that he doesn't want to give me a membership because if I get hurt lifting too much weight or something and the court asks him if, in his professional opinion, a fifteen-year-old should have been using the equipment unsupervised, he would have to say no. That I don't plan to use the weight machines, and that I'm willing to sign a statement agreeing not to, doesn't make a difference because see, he doesn't know that I won't randomly decide, "Hey, why don't I try to bench-press three hundred pounds and see what happens?"

How about if my parents sign a waiver agreeing that the center is not liable for any damage? No, because if something happens, insurance isn't the problem, it's the fact that he would be acting against his "professional opinion."

Why are seventeen-year-olds allowed to use the equipment unsupervised, when they are not legally very different from me? Because most people have been in puberty for a few years by age seventeen, and are therefore less likely to hurt themselves due to the fact that their bone structures have settled (or something).

I've been menstruating for over three years and am quite obviously not just beginning puberty- are there ways to tell whether or not my bone structure is ready to handle the exercise? Well, he's not a medical doctor, he's not qualified to make that decision.

And if I get a signed note from a qualified medical doctor agreeing that my bones are sufficiently ready? Well... hmmm... um... legality... weight resistance training... unsupervised... hmm... tell you what, if a signed note from a qualified medical doctor saying that it's completely safe for me to do weight resistance exercise in an unsupervised situation is produced, we're good to go.

Is a doctor likely to say that a seventeen-year-old, who can easily obtain a membership, is completely safe in the same situation?

And here he fiddled and hemmed and hawed and finally said something vague about family practitioners. I'm gonna get him, though. I could feel the blood pounding when I was standing there, having this (here much abbreviated) conversation. The guy doesn't trust me to honor a signed statement, won't acknowledge that I may be right in any way, and then he has the nerve to assume that I'm stupid enough to fall for this shit. Well, I'm not. I'm going to ask Dr. Murray for a statement saying that I am no less able to withstand weight resistance training than a typical seventeen-year-old. If they let any old seventeen-year-old have a membership, they can't refuse me one if I have that note.

Well, they can. But I'm going to fight them every step of the way. I got him to admit that the law doesn't have a restriction on age and that he's the only one I have to convince. (I asked him if it was up to him, and he said no, that the "risk coordinator" is the one that makes the decisions... then I asked for contact information for that person and he muttered, "Well, they defer to me on matters like this.") That means he has to either go back on his word or let me have my damn membership.

I need to remember to get my $39 back, because there's no way this is going through before at least October, and by then the semester will be half over.

At the Student Activities Council training on Friday, we did a get-to-know-each-other exercise, a list of questions like "What's your favorite holiday?" and "If you were a color, what color would you be?" One of them was "Who do you admire?" Several people said they admired people like George Washington and Michael Jordan, and it made me think.

Admiring a person's accomplishments is not, in my opinion, the same thing as admiring that person. I can appreciate that Albert Einstein created the Theory of Relativity, for example, and I know that he made a significant contribution to science. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that he as a person is worth admiration. I have never met him, therefore all I know about him is what has been relayed to me by people who also have never met him. This is not a good way to get the truth about a person. It's painfully similar to gossip- painful because of my own experiences with the effects of gossip.

The subject of gossip has come up in several discussions I've had lately. Today I ran into Tommy and D.J. at the Democratic picnic in Swope Park, and D.J., whom I don't know all that well, mentioned that I have quite a reputation among the LEARN crowd. He also said that he didn't pay attention to the gossip, but I know that it's impossible to hear that someone is a blood-sucking child rapist without at least feeling a little wary.

I know that comparing my situation to admiring celebrities/historical figures is a long shot, but honestly, I'm not trying to create an analytical comparison or anything. I'm just writing down a few things I've been thinking over the past few days. It bothers me that people say they admire Einstein, or Joan of Arc, or even Jesus. We don't know these people. They're pretty much characters in history, and they're flat characters. People aren't like that. Einstein was a person, too, and I have a problem with people saying they admire someone they cannot objectively judge. I have a problem with people admiring anyone whose flaws they can't or don't acknowledge, as a matter of fact, and I don't count Einstein's bad grades as a flaw.

Okay, disjointed rant over.