Goals

I hate being guilt-tripped into any charity. I hate feeling remorse for moral quandaries that shouldn't pertain to me, but are somehow thrust into my own responsibility by people whose agenda it is to shift blame and moral duty. I'm not a huge advocate of life-changing events or flashes of ephemeral righteousness that last no longer than the time between meals, but there was something about this site that made me think twice.

The oldest is 9, not going to school. The youngest is less than 2 years old. They lived in [a] severely polluted area. [Their] hands and faces were always dirty.

I would like somehow to earn a vast income, learn Mandarin and bring over 10 kids every year to educate. I'd like to start a school for those disabled kids or just kids living in gross poverty who have been abandoned and forgotten.

I would find that very fulfilling.

I would also like to know why that kid is wearing a Shroud of Beijing shirt.

Dealbreakers

Lots of things have been happening lately, but at the same time, it feels like nothing is happening. This is, of course, a result of the level of value I place on my daily goings-on.

Learning to appreciate the seemingly mundane is certainly a daunting task, and while the tempo of my life has hardly changed, it is definitely not the same everyday. People will complain that they have nothing to say, that their days are filled similarly and repetitively, yet I am compelled to believe that life is impossibly novel each moment.

Maybe our lives just need a different lens.

Or maybe I'm just looking for something that isn't there.

Heh. There may be something there that wasn't there before.

Talks

I just had a talk with a friend. It was 10 minutes of genuine conversation, which is much more than I can boast for a lot of other people. We were discussing our personal views on relationships in general with regards to his situation.

Without going into further detail, I'd like to bring up a constantly used, if not outright cliche, metaphor: the half full/empty glass.

The glass being half empty means a person has a pessimistic viewpoint, while half full indicates an optimistic person. All is well, until my friend brought up the point of someone seeing the glass as overflowing.

A person who claims the glass is overflowing is a cynic, and probably a melodramatic or at least hyperbolic one at that. What others see as a good or bad scenario, the cynic sees as good, but probably bad in the long run.

Take for example a break-up. While some view break-ups as a learning experience, others a terrible misfortune (full, empty, respectively), the cynic would say, "Yeah, it could be a learning experience, but it probably shows how incompatible I am, and love doesn't exist."

Personally, I hate those people.

That's because I think that the glass is always empty. This puts me in the category of the cynical optimist. It's empty, life sucks, shit's gonna happen, but it can be filled, this glass.

Probably not, though. The glass is always empty, and we just have to deal with it.

What are you?