No Win Situations

Have you ever been placed in situations that you did everything the way it was suppose to be done and you still ended up the loser in the situation? I know I have and recently  I find myself in one that I know after rolling and re rolling it over in my mind, and analyzing what has happened and what will in the future that there is no winning for me in it.  To better explain it it has to do with the in-laws and my relationship with them, recently we took into our household our brother-in-law who is in many ways socially retarded due to how he was raised and the situation he has been in.  In doing this we have tried to do everything in our power to make his stay with us something good, but every good thing we do is met with hostility or entitlement which is then relayed to the parent in-laws.  Then when we try to better the situation and ask him to make changes to help us out it turns into us picking on him and being unreasonable which is then relayed to the in-laws.  There is no winning in this situation for us though it was something done to help the person out and as a favor we will be the ones painted in a bad light.  It is sad because I can honestly say I have tried every conceivable thing to make it work out better and for it to change but it is obvious it will not.  Moving forward as well we will be unable to do anything to fix it without out our reputation sullied.  Ridiculously as it may sound because everyone thinks every problem can be solved with all parties being happy in this situation it seems only one party will be happy and it wont be us.
Priming is a psychological concept in which minds are stirred to draw conclusions by the thoughts they have going into the situation.  This can be both a good and bad thing, in our situation it is a bad thing because our brother-in-law is leading our parents in law to believe one thing and once the thoughts have taken root they will always be there .  This leads me to wonder how often in our lives have these peoples first impressions or lead ins make situations no win for us in our everyday life.  I concur it is a very pessimistic way of looking at things. but think about how many times in your life someone tells someone something about you whether true or not and that is what everyone else believes about you moving forward.  When I was still going to college I participated in a study in which they used this concept to see how impressions affected how instructors graded their students. and unfortunately if you started the class as a bad student even though you started turning in exemplary work it took the instructor longer to begin giving you the grade you had earned not tinted with the biases of their first impressions of what kind of student you where.  They also found the bad first impressions where more lasting then good which makes sense.  Anyways just a few thoughts I had nothing of to big of note or life changing, just observations on the unjust world from an admitted pessimist needing to vent some. Thanks to all of you for your reading!

Symbolism's

While we sleep at night our minds are organizing and stowing the information we gathered during the day.  I think everyone knows or has heard this much, however after having studied dream analysis as well as the science behind sleep and dreams I was somewhat surprised to find that those weird dreams we can remember are actually the visual manifestation of this information being stored.  Which means our computer or logical side of our brains (the brain untainted by emotion) sees and uses  these symbols to understand and categorize the world as we know it.
Knowing this it is no wonder why and how languages and speech is such an intricate part of our lives and the human condition.  It is in this thought and knowledge that has led me to become so interested in heraldry and symbolism and how they have been used over time.
 In Heraldry everything depicted whether it be a color, symbol, animal, shape, will all work in symbiosis to paint a picture of whom  the coat or arms or banner was originally made for basically telling a deeper story of the individual than anything some historian could tell you about that individual.  This using of small and seemingly insignificant symbols to cover and envelope large portions of knowledge fascinates me.  This in and of itself bears many similarities to my chosen profession of psychology which teaches techniques of reading what a person does, says, or acts as a symbol of themselves as a whole.  For instance the over use of the word "I" when talking to a friend or lover  can be an indicator of how committed the person is in the relationship, and or how selfish the individuals thoughts are underneath what they try to hide from others.  It is very cryptic in nature, and probably explains why I tend to be very cryptic in everything I write.  Peeling back looking at the pieces of anything can be very telling and is the basis or many professions, for example chemistry, science, and biology does this with the physical world, math does it with tendencies and patterns(though that would be a very shallow compared to what math can actually tell us), and the social sciences must do that with the mind, much like heraldry pulling apart the individual pieces and finding how they match together to make the person is as a whole. 

Those who follow Alice

As I was sitting around and pondering just how life never turns out the way you thought it would as a kid, and when your a kid everyone thinks its cute how a little boy will sitting there daydreaming and dreaming up their own fantasies of what their life will be when they grow up.  When your an adult however with your head in the clouds your branded a loser and often times you are.  For instance someone pursuing their dreams of doing whatever, in my case being a writer/author, and when others see you pursuing these dream they think you should grow up and start focusing on becoming an adult and face reality,  get a 9 to 5 job, and settle for the life that's right in front of you.  Much like in Alice and Wonderland stop chasing white rabbits down rabbit holes, and focus on the material world which surrounds you. I find myself wondering have people ever followed this door within a door, within a door, within a door, to the end to see where dreams have led people.

When you start unlocking your mind and pursuing thoughts they can be as entertaining as playing with Twiddle-Dee and Twiddle-dum, as contradictory as celebrating your unbirthday with the March Hare and Mad Hatter, even as vexing as trying to solve the riddles of the Cheshire Cat, or as simple of an solution as given to you by The Caterpillar. If you slow down you begin to realize that not just the things that are that matter in life, but also the things that are not.  Breaking things down you begin to see that seemingly complex things are very simple and cut from the same cloth as the simple things.  Your head begins to spin as you see why certain things are and why others are not.  The Puzzling Puzzle of what life really is begins to fall apart into simple elements and ingredients you begin to find yourself and how your fit into the whole of it. When your done with this journey you will have been everywhere yet nowhere at all, and be all the better for it.

You see while living, working, breathing, in the material world is important, Nothing has more ability to change your life and the lives of others than a dream.  In the Material world our actions can forge and create something new, however only in astral form  can these things we forged be given meaning. To all of you who follow Alice I salute you, however make sure all your actions are not lost in the rabbit hole.

It's Never Too Late

http://www.elyrics.net/read/t/three-days-grace-lyrics/never-too-late-lyrics.html
Life is hard there is no denying that; at times we can feel that things will never change and that we can never change.  For whatever reasons we at times cannot let go of the past and things that have happened to us in our lives and for it these things destroy the portions of us that is good.  In Three Days Graces song "Never Too Late" it is a great depiction of what it is like to live around someone or be someone caught in one of these vicious cycles that destroy people.  We all as in the video have had soiled hands leave their imprints on our souls whether it be someone in our lives or fate that dealt them to us.  Finding a reason to want to be part of this world and a reason to fight to regain what we have lost whether that be our sanity, our loved ones, our place in this world, our sense of purpose, our innocence, our sense of belonging all can be reclaimed and closures can be made if we are willing to battle our demons.  One of the most beautiful and symbolic parts of the music video is when the girl crippled by her past by what has happened to her she sees the butterfly fly past (which is both symbol of beauty and freedom) and finds the motivation to begin battling in her mind to reclaim her freedom from what had happened to her in the past.  Only then when she find that motivation does her guardian  angel appear and help her battle the memory of what had happened to her.  I myself have had to battle these demons to the point of breaking down and it is then and only then that your "angel" will appear and help you conquer your foe and you will be the stronger for it.  For life is much like muscles it must first be broken down to be built back up stronger.  Unfortunately people forget that with time things will feel better, and with work things can heal and change for "It's not to Late, It's Never Too Late."

Is the Juice Worth The Squeeze

"Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze" I find myself asking this question to myself often.  For instance lately I have been putting some job applications in at many jobs. This is something I have been doing for a long time now and every time some employer decides I'm not worth their time it makes it harder and harder to take the couple hours it  takes to fill out the applications and resume for employment.  Even with my blog which is mainly to sharpen my writing skills and to give me a place to organize my thoughts, I wonder to what end am I doing this.  Life in general seems to be filled with endless array of things that need to be done so you do them just to have to do them all over again.  The things that tend to give life meaning whether it be doing things you enjoy,spirituality, family, all seem to be just tossed aside so that you can simply stay alive. We are often taught that through hard work and determination we can acquire our dreams, but how many people work their whole lives trying to achieve something to die never having achieved it?

I would venture to guess that most people do. Only a select few people are lucky enough actually obtain their dreams. Even the people who are lucky enough to acquire their dreams find themselves acquiring more dreams to pursue.  I think this fact is something that in and of itself tells us the very nature of dreams.  Dreams though they seem to be the destination of a mans journey through life, are in fact just the motivation behind their journey. Meaning dreams are something to be thought of in times of rest, both the word and when it happens being intertwined more so than originally thought.  The very fact that we live in the natural world with laws and order is a deterrent that all dreams of a man will never be achieved at least not in this life.  I guess this explains my fascination with fiction and imagination because it is the only forum under which a man has complete and total freedom which is only limited by the mental capacities of those who dream it.  I find myself wondering whether my life should be  focused on dreaming up dreams which I can keep in my mind, or building up dreams I can share and show with others.  Should I dine on the orange itself or squeeze it's juice out  for others.The answer is clear though the way to achieve it in a meaningful way that can be enjoyed by others is not. In the end after all efforts are spent will the juice have been worth the squeeze?

Everything Dies

A thing that nearly every person starts to come to terms with as they age, is that Everything Dies and what it means to them and their existence.  The Death of loved ones literally leaves pieces of ourselves which are missing and which can never to be replaced.  The parts of our minds that holds the memories of that person is all we have left of them in this world leaving us with nothing but shadows and echoes of the persons portion of our own lives. As I find myself finding I now have had many loved ones pass, some with great memories left behind, others with sadness of how they lived their lives and the potential they had in their lives.  The one thing I love about this song by Type O Negative is that it both captures the idea of how it makes those feel who are left behind and the depressing thing it can be.  Age and experiences like this make you realize how important it is to make the moments with those you love count, and to make your own memory be a good one for them.
It is part of nature that all things must come to an end in our lives and the lives of our loved ones.  It is the thought that their will be an end that it many ways can make people strive to make their lives something to be remembered.  We are after all in this world just the memories we leave with those around us, and many times most of what is left of us in this world are those memories of things we have taught people good and bad which they in turn teach others. It is this after all which ties us to our ancestors and them to us.  "Somber as it may be though we laugh and cry, we must each someday die."

Web Of Influence

Charting your Sphere of Influence, or web as  I like to think of it can be a dizzying thing to try to do.  The reason I prefer to call it a web instead of a sphere is because a sphere is something that someone can just wander into, a web on the other hand denotes that the others are tied or stuck to you in some way which I think is more true to form.  For instance a person doesn't just walk in and out of your sphere of influence because whether you like it or not you just being in the presence of others alters their perception of the word even if just minutely.
To try to look at it on a more simple facet or a more practical one, a couple of my years ago my cousin made the mistake of taking his own life.  Though he may have at the time thought that noone cared for him or that the world would be better off without him the loss of that one life has drastically changed the world.  His immediate family still struggles to come to terms of having their lost loved one, his younger sisters are often depressed, his older brother just got a tattoo of the phrase "Never Forgotten". This is to be expected when thinking of a persons life it is those closest to them feel the brunt of it the most.  To take it deeper though think of the one act and how many peoples lives were affected, how many people took time off work to attend his funeral to have another take their place at work and the dominoes continue to fall until we have thousands, maybe millions, maybe even the whole world being affected, and much of it ends up being in a negative way. Much like the fabled butterfly effect we can choose our actions in our sphere of control, however we cannot control what affect those actions have on the world. Sadder still in situations is that we cannot chose who is stuck to us in our web of influence.  In the example  I stated before I'm sure my cousin had no idea what a profound affect this had on me, a person who in many ways was just a little footnote in his life  though I think of him weekly if not daily.
This I think brings life into a whole another perspective because there are many light and dark acts and influences in this world it makes me wonder which do mine fall under.  Did I in my life unintentionally cause some person four or more weblinks down the line the have some very negative things happen in their life?  One may choose those they are close with and those of whom they spend their time, however one cannot pretend that the world does not feel their everyday actions.  After all it is believed that the whole universe weight is held on a persons shoulders and if that person suddenly disappeared the whole universe would have to collapse to feel the space that that one person once took, which could in theory make the whole universe collapse into itself. 

Breaking Down the Broken

A little more about my background, I used to work at a school for troubled teens and was a Group Therapy leader there which is what turned me onto the whole Psychology thing.  One thing that stood out to me when I was there was how similar the backgrounds of the kids there were that had the same problems, and anti-social behaviors.  This got me pondering the religious aspects or theologies behind it.  I am in many ways a man of science, but this got me thinking logically how "The Devil" or evil would work against people.  For those who wonder or point fingers about this kind of stuff I am not saying this is how it works but what makes most sense logically. 

Unable to know the thoughts of a man but knowing the science of how the mind works, if one was wanting to find a way to control a mind and know its tendencies they could do certain things to gain it.  For example if one where to entice a person to sexually abuse a child at a young and impressionable age their minds would block off everything to do with what happened.  When they started to get older the mind then tries to find closure and a sense of what happened to them, they tend to gravitate towards the things that caused them such pain at a young age.  This is why children who have been abused sexually tend to become promiscuous at a young age, or have major problems with pornography or sexual perversions.  Their minds are trying to find out what really happened to them and why it happened to them so it uses personal experiences to try to fill in the gaps.  

So in short touch the individual at a young age with a certain type of sin (as it were) and though you don’t know what they are thinking at all times you do know the nature of what their sin is and how it would affect the individual and so they can use it to pull that person down.  From all my studies and personal experience much of our struggles point back to our past,  though not all its still very interesting to think of. This is just some food for thought, all be it some out their kind.

Going Poe

Madness vs. Intelligence

"Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect."

- from "Eleonora"

Poe in many ways had it right, right down to how he lived his life and how he was viewed by others.  The over analytical mind tends to travel to dark places.  To incessantly pick and pick at things and break them down into their key components one sees all the flaws in them which is great when investigating a crime or troubleshooting a problem but not when one is trying to sleep at night.  To have an analytical mind is to feel pain when that power of perception turns on its owner eating away at them and their own actions in life.  This double edge sword making them brilliant but yet prone to depression and as others see it madness.  The very thing that gives the individual strength also limits and shackles their potential in this world.  

I have for a majority of my life travelled from alternating depths of depression and back again; walking on the very edge of the ice of sanity until it cracks.  The only respite being when I can find something to distract my mind and its analysis from me and on to something else.  This is why I turned to writing and constructing highly constructed and complex worlds in my head to busy a relentless mind.  Now I find myself trying to find ways to motivate this mind to do the work of writing these stories so it can do me some good but with the stories completed in my mind it finds no reason to focus on puzzles already pieced together.  Here’s to hoping I can find more ways to keep focused on my writing so it can pay dividends in my life.

The Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss

Lately I have been pondering just the generalities of life and I find myself thinking that life is much like "pissing in the wind" sorry for such crude expression but I find it fits the thought best.  The reason I phrase it as such is that it often feels like I or we are caught in an endless cycle of dealing with problems and dealing with potential problems just to have another rise to where its the same as pissing in the wind.  There is a concept taught by the Buddhist and a few other religions which mentions we are our ties to the universe.  Take a person and find what their greatest wants and desires are and you can know what their ties to the universe are. In theory if a man were to eliminate these ties they would be free to live their lives with them being in control of a good portion of their destiny.  This is a very deep and complex concept but to put it in more simple terms for example if a man were addicted to nicotine (a tie to the universe) it would manifest if by the person say smoking after every meal or in times of great stress.  I have tried to illuminate my ties to the universe in many ways but I have come to the conclusion that to do so you have to leave all family and wants behind and go live life as a hermit.  Which in my mind is to steep a price to pay to be the total creator of your destiny for what gives life meaning if not the others that are a part of our lives.  In many ways this concept is a paradox if taken at an literal level, but taken on a theoretical level it is says change yourself and you will find the world changes with you.  Reminding myself of this is something I hold dear and something that gives me the motivation I need to try new things in hopes of different results, and here's to hoping for new results in my very redundant life.

A sociological look at blogs

I spent a good portion of my time looking though the blogs of others today and I must say their were a few things that stuck out to me.  The first one was that my blog seems to be very dull visually which Is why I uploaded a few new pictures to go along with the blogs  I have already written. The next thing that I was surprised by was simply the content and what people where finding interesting enough to share with the rest of the world.  In psychology and sociology (and naturally for myself) they teach you to think not of what the person is doing but why they are doing it.  There are hobbyists blogs, there are journal style blogs, and even religious blogs.  In thinking of that I found myself wondering what the motives of each of the individuals were in writing their blogs.  For instance with myself conscientiously I use my blog as a way to organize my thoughts and to write things I have thought of down so I don't forget them.  That seems like some logical reasons for doing it right, however if one were to dig a little deeper they might find that I was a middle child and an introvert that was raised in a house of extroverts which deeply imbued in me a sense of wanting my opinion understood and valued which is something that on a deep level my mind feels it didn't get while I was growing up.  The why and what is wanted out of the effort put into the blog is something that I find very interesting.do the other thousands of  bloggers have reasons as complex and deeply ingrained as mine? Or are we all just lonely souls whispering into the dark and praying for someone to whisper back?

The Cowled Crow in a Nut-shell

I thought should anyone ever decide to read this(or maybe just because I like the look of my own writing) they may be curious as to why I chose the moniker Cowled Crow.  I have a fascination with the brain(of coarse), symbolism, and heraldry.  The Crow in these different facets has many cool meanings, for instance the crow was believed by the ancient Norse and other cultures to be the usher for spirits to the land of the dead. In heraldry the crow was only given to men who were considered sages or men of strategy. In China much like the black cat when you see one it is considered bad luck. In Native American belief he was wise but also meddlesome, there are many other things I could go into however to put it more directly the crow is a bit of an anomaly and I love things that cannot be pigeonholed into one category.  The Cowled portion (which is another way of saying cloaked) has to do with the Cloak and Dagger saying that those who are wearing cloaks or are cowled they are also concealing their motives.  So if you haven't put the parts together yet the Cowled Crow basically is my motives for writing this blog.  I am not going to pigeon-hole myself like how many other blogs do (which is a great recipe for getting many visits to your blog by the way because it gives people a subject matter). My writing for the blog is for my edification and hopefully through me edifying myself you yourselves will also be edified( a great word by the way).  I hope all are enjoying their lives and setting new goals for this year!