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serbbballjunkie
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Name: Alice
Country: United States
State: Massachusetts
Metro: Boston
Birthday: 2/10/1987
Gender: Female
Interests: God, love, peace happiness, y'know how it goes, languages, Serbia, school, kids, family, friends, etc. I'm pretty interesting though, so you can hit up my AIM.
Expertise: None really.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Other
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  brzeopanke
Member Since:
9/26/2003
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| My two biggest sins (that I know of, and that's an important
distinction) are pride and greed. I mean, not that I'm not guilty
of everything all the time I'm sure, but these are just some big things
I'm struggling with right now. I'm going to leave pride for after
because it's more complicated and insidious (read C.S. Lewis if you
don't believe me) and take a stab at greed.
It's hard to believe greed is really a sin in our culture. We
love buying and selling and making money and saving up for the things
we want, that we even imagine we deserve.
Why do we think that? It's so perverse and immoral. We, who pride
ourselves on having a cultural moral compass (don't make me laugh)
believe that we deserve the things we get and that we get what we
deserve. Not that I want to bash Calvin, or Protestants in
general, just because I think the so-called "Protestant work ethic" is
a crock, but think about it. God tries to tell us, time and time
again in the Old and New Testaments that life is crazy. Good
things don't always happen to good people, but bad things don't
necessarily happen to them either. Same with the bad
people. Yes, there is a certain justice to the Bible, but in the
ultimate sense, not necessarily for the short term. Just because
the work you're doing makes you some cash money, gives you security,
maybe even though it puts food on the table for your kids, doesn't mean
it's getting you points with God. It's like the man who built all
the barns.
The American dream, like it or not has a lot to do with having
money. A lot. More than I sometimes want to think about,
because sometimes I think the have-nots can have an even worse attitude
towards money than the haves. That's me. Overall mostly a
have-not. Not that I'm not unfathomably wealthy by the standards
of most of the world. I make more money in a day than any of my
cousins can in a week. But I have to look at myself by the
standards of where I live and who surrounds me. By these
standards I am a have-not. I have a negative net worth. My
annual income is below the poverty line for my state. I live with
my parents. I have to scrimp and save my money. And I want
to get out of this so badly. More than I want anything right now,
and that's wrong. I don't want to have to set myself a
budget. I don't want to keep my head down when I walk out of the
store where I work to my car so that I'm not tempted by everything I'd
like to buy, that I dream
about buying once I pay off all my debts and save up some money.
I don't want to avoid seeing my friends so that I don't have to pay for
bills in restaurants and coffeeshops, so that I have to be the only one
who doesn't try on anything at the mall, or to have to pretend I don't
like anything I try on. I want to be able to go out and see
movies, or to pick up a coffee on the way to work. I want someday
to be able to buy a nice house with wide open spaces like my friends in
the wealthy suburbs have with a white carpet that someone else keeps
clean and a big TV and the movies I want to see neatly lined up in the
drawer underneath. I want to be able to buy clothes that make me
look good so that people won't judge me for what I wear (I know they do
it, I do it) and to pick out something I like at the bookstore without
flipping it over to look at the price sticker. I don't want to
have to pull out a calculator when I get my bills and figure out how
much I can spend this month and leave the credit cards at home when I
go out so I can't break my own rules. I just don't want to feel
deprived because of money. But there's the truth of this whole
thing. It's not about how much money I have, it's about ME.
It doesn't take being rich to be greedy. I may be poor, but I am
not POOR IN SPIRIT.
I like Chanel (I mean, I do work for them) and MaxMara and Dior.
I like TV and the sports club and nice restaurants and Starbucks and
cute shoes. I want to have a big engagement ring and lots of
flowers at my wedding and a beautiful flowing dress. And that's
FUCKED UP. My attitude toward money and material things is the
problem and I feel deprived because of my greed, not because of my
financial situation. I have a house with heat and food to eat and
a family and a boyfriend who love me and warm clothes to put on and
beyond that I have a mercedes and a couple designer purses and a laptop
and cable TV and makeup that I probably paid more for than this laptop
even cost when it was new and I'm paying for classes at a university
this semester and so much more that I couldn't even type out without
wasting your time. And I feel DEPRIVED? Is it part of the human
condition to be insane? Because sometimes I think I need therapy, and
not the kind you pay for where some fluffy lady tells you that you
deserve whatever it is that you want out of life, like having a job
that requires no skill and pays a lot of money. I need the kind
of therapy where someone smacks the sense into me with my $150 hair
straightener.
This is not a question of deserving anything. I will get what I
deserve in the end. We all will and you can count on that. What
is it about our culture and deserving things? Have you ever
watched My Super Sweet Sixteen?
If you haven't, you aren't missing out unless you need more proof that
our culture and MTV in particular are trying to suck your soul into a
great big whirpool that's going straight to
Hell, which you probably don't. And I'm only half kidding about
that. In any case if you have missed all of the thirty million
episodes or if you aren't as spoiled as me and don't in fact have cable
(a deprivation some of my siblings have expressed would be worse than
starvation) then I will fill you in. It's a show that features
the sweet sixteen parties of very wealthy and spoiled teenagers.
All of these parties have price tags in the tens of thousands and many
in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The thing that shocks me
about most of these kids (and there are a lot of them, and watching
them has a strange kind of fascination. Where do they come
from? Where do they find them all?) is that they all tell the
world in no uncertain terms that they deserve everything they're
getting. This is especially true of the kids who come from poor
backgrounds and were adopted by wealthy parents. You'll see a
picture of the teenager as a toddler, outside a dilapidated building
followed by the chirpy narration of the same teenager, now insanely
rich: "I used to have nothing, so now I deserve everything I missed out
on when I was a kid! Now I have everything I want! My nickname at
school is Paris Hilton!" Then, when the hairdresser ruins the WHOLE
party by making princess's hair too curly, princess is
devastated. I mean, am I the only one who thinks there's a
problem with this? Who deserves anything at all, really?
Even if you worked at a job to earn the money for your private jet,
does that mean you deserve it? Deserve: to merit, be qualified
for, or have a claim to (Dictionary.com) We need to seriously
think about what we mean when we say that, I most of all. Okay,
so what's my point?
1) People who do not, or have not, in the past had enough money
are often greedier than those who have always had enough money.
They do not deserve any more than anyone else. Greed is a sin no
matter whether you have money or not, "blessed are the POOR IN SPIRIT"
like Jesus said in the sermon on the mount. Being poor in spirit,
though I am not too too familiar with exactly what it entails
definitely includes not wanting everything that rich people have.
Jesus says that coveting another man's wife is as bad as sleeping with
her, that wrath is as bad as killing someone. Then isn't wanting,
fantasizing about being rich as bad as carpeting your floor with
hundred dollar bills?
2) We always feel deprived no matter how much we have. I am the
perfect example. We should be trying to feel less deprived and be
more deprived.
3) Society encourages this sin and has turned much of our youth into
grasping little monsters that instead of screaming "I want" in the
store now scream "I deserve!" If you think this is an
exaggeration then watch My Super Sweet Sixteen.
Better yet, have a younger sibling or child or acquaintance watch it
just once and see how much he or she wants to be the grasping little
monster on the show.
4) I know that I am living in the slavery of this sin as long as I
can't make myself live on spending money of $300 a month and that I am
in spirit, as bad as those unfortunate little monsters that I pity so
much. In fact, I am worse because I have like 4 Bibles sitting in
my bedroom telling me how I should be living my life and I am not
paying any attention.
This entry is already really long and I feel like I have gotten a lot
off my chest for the evening, so I will save my other deadly sin for
OPERATION: FREE THE SLAVES part deux. And everyone who commented
on my last entry thank you so much for commenting because that entry
really came from the heart and I'm glad something I had to say
resonated and I read everything you say too even though I am a bad
commentor.
One more note: I am not a theology genius and any of the many many
people out there who are better at studying Christianity than I am
please feel free to correct my somewhat shaky grasp of the words of
Christ.
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| Sometimes, in our daylit lives, in the safety of electric lights, we
forget that darkness is the natural state of things. When I used
to go out walking at night, that was always what troubled me.
Darkness doesn't fall, it doesn't cover things, it can't be
lifted. It's light that falls, light that alters and
distorts. Darkness is simply light's absence. However,
darkness can mean more than just an absence of light. In our
metaphorical language, darkness is the absence of knowledge, or maybe
it's just that we think of knowledge as light. Fear of the dark
is impossible, because darkness is nothing. We fear that which we
do not know. When I lay in bed at night as a child darkness
didn't scare me. The spectres of the night, things I couldn't see
or even imagine, plagued my sleep.
Now, at nineteen, the future is dark in front of me. I have no
paths. I have no maps. I feel like the lost sheep, having
strayed beyond my comfortable pastures with no guiding light to tell me
which way to go. I cannot go back. I must simply keep
moving ahead without aim. School was awful. I still shrink
away even from thinking about it because the fact that I left is a
huge, unhealed wound. I'm so defensive and hurt about it that I
can't even explain to myself why I left. There are so many
reasons, and I give different ones to different people, but I still
don't entirely understand. I don't know if I can face going to
Tufts again. I feel ashamed and hurt that I left, and at this
point I won't even go there to pick up my stupid bike because I don't
want to see my dorm again. There are still people I haven't told
that I quit school. I feel like I failed. The shadow of my
confusion about Tufts has been contributing to my aimlessness to a
larger degree than I really want to admit.
I have doubts about where I want to go with my work. I committed
to a whole year of doing this, and I know that's not that big a deal,
since I left school for at least that long anyways, but what do I do
after that? Do I push for advancement? Do I want to work in
a Macy's indefinitely? Should I try to move to a more upscale
store with higher pay? Is that really an improvement, or just
more stress at essentially the same career level? Should I try to
become a makeup artist? Is that even remotely what I want to
do? Do I want to just forget the whole thing and go back to
school and do something else entirely? But for what? What
do I want to study? And to what end? I feel like I should
at least keep on this career path and see where it takes me, because
it's some kind of bearing, at least till I have more direction.
Plus I don't like quitting things. And I like doing this.
That must mean something.
I feel the same way about my love life. I want things to be going
somewhere or I feel stuck and frustrated. I don't want to be
caught between "want" and "should" all the time. I question
myself all the time and I don't know if I just want to be married now
because, like the job, it's a bearing, it's a step in some concrete
direction, or because it's actually the direction I want to be
going. I mean, I do want that, don't get me wrong, but it's the
when and how that get to me. How do the pieces of all these
things fit together? Which is most important to me? At
least when I was in school there was a system. There were
requirements to complete, steps to take, places to be at certain
times. I feel like maybe I need that kind of structure, or I need
someone in my life to be giving that to me. I want that person to
be Sasha, but I don't know how to explain that to him. I just
want someone or something to be my starting point, my rock, or light,
to go back to the metaphor I was thinking about earlier. Then
when I have that, everything else can build from that. It's not
that I'm a dependent person, but everyone needs goals. If I
didn't come with them built in, where am I supposed to get them
from?
Sometimes I think I end up answering my own questions but I don't want to listen to myself because the answers are hard.
"In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the
light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend
it...That was the true Light, which gives light to every man coming
into the world." John 1:4-9
"Therefore, whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will
liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock." Matt. 7:24
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| Sometimes, when you don't know what to do, you do the right thing
anyways by accident. I wrote a letter this week because I didn't
know how to help someone, and the letter helped. Go figure.
The pen is mightier than...well a lot of things, but in this case,
mightier than the hands of the person holding it.
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| For Monique:
“Then you are mistaken, and you know nothing about me, and nothing about the sort of love of which I
am capable. Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be
dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still: if you raved, my arms
should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat—your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me: if
you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as
fond as it would be restrictive. I should not shrink from you with disgust as I did from her: in your quiet
moments you should have no watcher and no nurse but me; and I could hang over you with untiring
tenderness, though you gave me no smile in return; and never weary of gazing into your eyes, though
they had no longer a ray of recognition for me.”--Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
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| LOL
Sasha: btw i'm giving you the look... with my fiery deep blue eyes a breeze comes around from somewhere and pulls at my hair i melt your bra-strap with my laser eyes your bra whips off with a thundercrack, fragmenting your shirt into small peices which float down to the ground like leaves in the fall leaving you bare for my peircing gaze
<3<3<3 Don't you just WISH it were that easy to get me naked.
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