Halloa all! Miss me? Well the Hell week at BU is over and so begins Spring Break. I'm not doing much exciting though....one of these days I will...I promise. I'll be spending much of my week here at home in good/bad ole Rockland, MA. I always am excited to come home at first, but after a few hours I realize why I was so excited to leave the place my senior year in high school.

Speaking of high school, do any of you look back at the person you were in high school, even your senior year, and just wonder how you were once that way? It's amazing how people change so much in so little time, and how your experiences and friends shape you.

High school was so negative for me in so many ways. Sometimes I was a big neurotic ball of low self confidence, and I constantly questioned whether people really liked me or were just acting like my friends to be nice. Other times I was really just so angry, and had a "fuck you" attitude towards alot of things. When either of those moods didn't prevail I was just generally sad. There was happiness, but it only came in flashes. There was a good day or a good couple of days, but generally contentment was rare and overridden by the malaise that engulfed me in those years.

As my senior year wound down the tide turned, and I began to feel nuetral about things, which was a vast improvement over the preceding few years, when day in and day out i just felt bad about things. In college I think I figured out that life wasn't like high school, much to my relief. People weren't as judgemental and critical. It was then I could feel comfortable about myself and alot more changes fell into place after that.

I think it was in the novel The Elementary Particles where I saw the observation that every few years your body's cells turn over. In other words, the cells you have today in your body are completely different from the cells you had X years ago. To me that brings up all sorts of interesting questions about ourselves that are far too deep to bring up in a single blog entry, but one thing it does highlight really well related to this entry is that we are always changing. Our lives are filled with renewal and change, and we shoudn't resist it. In fact, we should seek it out. If we stagnate too long in one place emotionally intellectually etc. then we run the risk of missing out on what life is really about. I really think that the primary reason that we were put on this Earth, and why we were endowed with so much intelligence is so we could better ourselves, not just intellectually, but emotionally and spiritually.

This is one of the reasons I can't stand conservative Christian people, because they fundamentally miss this point. They believe that everything you need to know about living your life was zapped onto a stone tablet 4000 years ago, and what was was supposedly zapped onto the stone tablet is absolute and cannot be ammended or changed in any way. If this is true then what was the point of Jesus? Yeah I understand the vague theological reasons, tat he had to die for everybody's sins etc and so on. But, if that was the case why didn't he just say "Look, follow this law you've already got, it's all you need" and then just die? I think he had something to tell us that was more than just "be good boys and girls." If you look at what he said there were two maor threads: one was "Love everybody" which is always good advice, but the second was "Go Beyond the Law." Which, again, I don't think means just "be really really good" that would be fairly unprofound for a savior. I think he was saying, "Yeah this law is nice, but you have to focus on bettering yourself (getting to the point where you can 'love your enemy')." Morality isn't about following incomprehensible rules, it's about bettering yourself into a person you didn't think it was possible for you to be.

So, don't be afraid to take that big step forward