... and I don't feel any different.
Actually, the capital-N, capital-Y New Year just hit me today in some kind of strange lapse of Orthodox Christmassy time. Not that that has much to do with anything. Things have calmed down. Not sure what all is going on in Idaho with much of anyone but my mom, as I can't seem to get ahold of anyone else who is willing on returning phone calls. Maybe the state went boom.
Anyhow, current affairs, which I have previously ignored as much as possible, have now caught up with me, and I'm not liking much of anything these days. I scrutinize every word with coke-bottle glasses and I still find lies slithering around the truth. I'm not only starting to feel like an 80 year old woman (these kids! they are wearing nothing! and they're all so bloody rude! want to smack them all upside their heads!), but a paranoid hippieish new-agey 80 year old woman. My mom was friends with people like this when I was growing up, and I still to this day think the patchouli had saturated a bit too much of their grey matter (the world will end in 2000! crystals will help! save up your canned organic beans!). I found them amusing for a while, in their "building pyramids with copper pipe in which to meditate, man," ways, as really it does very little damage to my life, and most of them were smart enough to send their kids away to communes and boarding schools, so they are likely not the kids I'm slapping in my head to and from work on the train.
Oh no, this is me, being not necessarily paranoid, but thinking that things would just be so much easier if I had 100 acres of land somewhere and just farmed the food I needed and had kids that learned about things without the shout of televisions and media media media and MacDo all around (blame the fast food!). I see the future that most of the parents of these kids didn't see, the future of giving up because everything else around is so intent on working in the exact opposite direction of the knowledge of importance one can pass down to the future of humanity. I am worrying, albeit unnecessarily, already about this and how to have kids who are stable enough and self-realizing enough to mostly ignore the b.s. and just become normal intelligent people who aren't obsessed with everything they're "supposed to be" obsessed with. Gahhhh.
Sadly, the kids I see with most potential are usually those that end up not so much changing the world or even their own communities, but who are content with living their lives out and creating those just like them as replacements. Those kids tend to be the religious ones. Not the crazy zealots, mind you, not so much, but the Mormon kids who were all mostly just... nice kids. I know full well that having a community of religion provides such a wonderful quilted basket of security around the followers, but where the community for those that... aren't? I am, at this point, a profound agnostic, and don't see myself going in any direction other than the one I'm in forever. Is there some kind of community of like-minded individuals who save the religious and political indoctrination for home? Is there anywhere besides ... well... a commune where one might be able to remove onesself enough from society, but not create little unibombers in the process?
Also? The U.S. Government wants everyone to get an ID card that will supposedly stop terrorists because... well, no reason has yet to be given. Anyhow, I don't want one. Fuck that. I just paid $100 for a driver's license that's good until 2015. However, if I don't get one, I get *extraly* searched every time I want to fly? Fine, fuck you, airline industry. I've been looking more into taking the train places anyhow. I'm sick of the 3 hours I spend at an airport doing nothing, then the plane, and then the annoyance, and wow. It's an ordeal, and I'm done. I give it 2 more chances - NYC and MI this year, train or boat everywhere else.
I'm going to buy a house this year. I need some place to tear things apart and put things back together.
