A First Person's Point of View

“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.” Theophrastus

I’d like to start of by asking for a moment of your time. But what really is a moment of your time? Can you really give me a moment of your time. Is it within your abilities to “give” me a moment of your time. Can you, if you will, “alienate” it from yourself? Or is it something intertwined with the very existence of you? I’ll let you think about that. For now I will talk.

“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.” Theophrastus 

Yet we feel so comfortable bartering it off for dollars on the hour. Well, some people put a $ value on their life by the year but either way. Who says life is invaluable when you are willing to sell it for something as dispensable as dollar bills?  

Can we really say that you can’t put a price on human life when we do so on a daily basis? /EndRant.

Or begin rant… on how time is just a Western imposed attempt to try and control and contain life/lives when you really cannot. Time, as we know it, is inherently colonized. Like the land they colonized, but cannot really “own”, they colonized life and called it “time” and insisted that you be “on time” for your job. 

I have come to terms with the fact that I will always and forever (if I must ironically use temporal terms) be late for whatever I have to do or wherever I have to be. I can of course train myself to be on time or early, but it is in my nature to be late. I thought about how stressful it could be if you were always concerned with being “on time” to a certain thing. I was late to work from my other job and I had to sit and wait until that job was over before I was able to leave to my other job. If I had truly and naturally cared about being late, if it were in my nature to be overly concerned with time and time management, I would have been stressed at every second that passed. And something told me that maybe I should be stressed. But then I thought, why? To quote one of my favorite movies, this is my life and it’s ending one second at a time. Why should or would I rationally care if it’s ending one second at a time at this job as opposed to another job? If it were my last hour on earth, and if I knew I was gonna die today, would I be in a hurry to get over to my other job? No. That job would be the least of my worries. Treating it as if it were of major importance to my life is not only dishonest but irrational. Treating it as as if it were of major importance allows others to create a false sense of my reality. And society, therefore, by telling you where and when you should be, is creating a false sense of your reality. When Western society imposed the time-value system on the Indigenous of North America, time became a tool of colonization, and is arguably still a tool of colonization.

Would the world end if I didn’t show up to work when I was supposed to? No. Would my life value be significantly depreciated if I constantly had to deal with the daily non-stop stress of “being on time” and not “being late”? Yes.

My life is what I’m living now, not what I could be living, or what I should be living. For me to be worrying about what I could be doing or should be doing is to not live in the present. And to not live in the present, is to not live at all.

Thank you for your time. You can’t have it back. Even though you didn’t give it to me in the first place.

And that’s how colonization works! 

Instead of mastering the art of mind-reading, I think it would be much more useful in life to master the art of heart-reading.

I need to write something on how investing in today’s system of higher education is similar to investing in the Military Industrial Complex and the Prison Industrial Complex. The only difference is that with the Academic Industrial Complex you get a piece of the pie. Need to write about how these three components make up the holy trinity of POC life-“choices” and how the AIC is particularly violent because people don’t realize how violent it is and therefore recruit without questioning.

I need to write a song about Perspective. About appreciating what you got and how Perspective is the only way you can understand and feel the true value of life and what it has to offer to you.

I need to stop starting to write songs and then never finish them.

I’m going to Minnesota!  

I couldn’t sleep last night because I know that it’s over between us. I’m not bitter anymore, because I know that what we had was real. And if in some distant place in the future we see each other in our new lives, I’ll smile at you with joy and remember how we spent the summer beneath the trees, learning from each other and growing in love. The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds, and that’s what you’ve given me. That’s what I hope to give to you forever. I love you. I’ll be seeing you. Noah 

I hate being too tired that you can’t sleep

I hate when your memory taunts you

Like it’s letting you know it’s there but it doesn’t tell you where it’s at

I hate when I can’t remember things

I hate when I can’t help but remember things.

sigh. Maybe I’ll remember when I wake up.

I’m still working on my “Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian Student”. By ‘working’, I really mean ‘putting off’. I should get it done. 

But as for the topic of this post. I really want to say that there are 2 things that bug me more than anything in dealing with people/communication/drama. One of them by far out weighs the other and that is Truth Distorters.

I say Truth Distorters and not liars because I am talking about a person whose stories are based on something that actually happened, but they distort the facts with their conspiracy-driven mind. So like if the TD sees you talking with someone that talking automatically becomes conspiring to do some dirty deed. When they see you with a group of people it’s actually some secret conspiracy meeting. And there is of course the completely out-of-context word manipulation. It’s worse when the person actually holds a position of influence over others. It’s like seeing a movie that’s “based on a true story” but people actually believe it’s entirely true (as explained in this one video). They fail (or refuse) to see the “based on” part and just see the “A TRUE STORY” part. I don’t know who’s worse, the manipulator who tries to deceive others or the people who are foolish enough to believe them beyond a shadow of a doubt. At least I hope the person is trying to deceive others… It actually got to that point where I was like, I sincerely HOPE they are intentionally distorting and manipulating the truth because if this is actually what they are seeing/perceiving, they have bigger problems to worry about as they may have to be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Srsly. I just do not get how you can warp things in your mind to think that, “oh that person’s eating pizza with that one other person, they must be up to something”. Is your life really that boring that you have to make shit up? If it is then find something else to occupy your time because what you’re doing is a lot more harmful than you might stop (or not even stop) to think. I dunno, find a soap opera to get into. 

The next issue is about people who insist on playing the victim. This is probably one of the lowliest, scum ball characteristic you can possibly possess. It’s when a person does everything in their power to make it seem as though they are the victim. They will twist the truth, flat-out lie, manipulate people, fake alliances/friends, ANYTHING so that it furthers their case. Whether or not it’s even true that they are a victim, it makes no difference. If I, as a kid, fall down because someone pushed be to the ground, of course I am dignified in saying that I am a victim to that person’s actions. But if I were to play the victim, I would cry as loud as possible and point a finger at the person who pushed me yelling “HE PUSHED ME! OWW! OWW! IT HURTS! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?! SOMEONE CALL THE COPS!”. How childish and pathetic is that? Now think of this but with adults in this scenario. How ridiculous right? Playing the victim will get you no where but feeling sorry for yourself. While you may think you are getting away with maybe having other people feel sorry for you and making the other person look bad, you don’t, and may never, realize that the biggest injustice that is being done is to yourself. You realize how bad it is for your self to be constantly undermining your own agency in everything? This might be a chicken an egg thing but if anything what this reveals about your self-confidence is that you have none. And playing the victim will only make this worse because you might actually start to believe the lies you tell, you might actually start to believe you are worth nothing, a victim, a passive agent who always gets bad stuff done to them. That is, if you already don’t. Take control of your goddamned life. You’re only truly a victim of your self.