The Immeasurable Percent.

So, I have discovered something as of late, something I have always knew but never quite theorized. It's that confidence the most immeasurable thing. I'm sure scientifically speaking, it's not and they have probably found ways to measure it. From one human being to the other you can't just tell. You can't look at someone and say they have a lot of confidence or not. You may think you can, especially if you're the kind that looks at body language, but I am of the opinion that it can't be measured.

And why? It's because of this. The human race, as a whole, has many things in common. One of them being that when it's comes to pretending everything is all right we are pretty much the shit. I mean, some people, they wear their true feelings on their face and all, but I think in their minds they are still pretending. Our deepest pretend is that we are all confident.

I do it all the time, the pretending, I can walk into a room at a party and boldly announce my entry but the truth is I'm so scared of everyone noticing how not confident I am.. Or maybe not. I don't know. I can't tell you at any given moment how confident I am. But it's so hard to tell. And I never even think of confidence as a relative thing in my mind. I don't think , 'I am this confident right now' and 'I am not confident at the moment.' Instead I just do and I exist and I seem. Sometimes I seem confident and sometimes I don't. And even being myself, I am myself and therefore I should know. I should know this part of me, an essential part of makeup that is so important and shapes how interact with the people and things of the world, I should know. But I don't, I just don't fucking know. And I don't think any of us do.

I make assumptions a lot, especially those about human beings. I am probably wrong in every way. I mean, I have met a lot of human beings in my life and I have the uncanny ability to observe them without even meaning too. But the comparative number of humans I have met to that of the world is very small. I shouldn't make plural assumptions, but I do. I like to pretend we're all connected. I think we all have no fucking clue about confidence and how it effects our every reaction of everyday and how it shapes us. The confidence of one man or woman could shape the world differently. And it is the thing we know about least, an essential percent of us that I think can never be measured.

Fin.

-Keshia

#58/100 Books in 2012: Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

The Spectrum of Us

Okay, so I've quoted him in here before but I'm going to do it again. Joss Wheddon is a genius and one of favorite Buffy quotes ever is in the musical episode where Dawn states the hardest to do in the world is live in it. Which is true, but what makes it so hard to live in it is the misunderstandings between people.
Humans really are these unique minded things, and the reason for most of our conflicts is from not understanding each other. I think it's too hard and we often forget the trouble that everyone deals with everyday. We are too wrapped in our own incomprehension of others and their own incomprehension of us. We're all very selfish, who like to reign the anthem of 'No one understands me' all the time. Or at least I do. I'm the most selfish person I know.

And somehow, I came up with this idea about humans. It's probably something you've heard before. I think human beings live all across this broad spectrum, it's dark at one end and light at the other. None of us is in the dark and none of us is in the light, instead we all wander around somewhere in the grey. And I think along the wondering among the spectrum we sometimes bump into or cross paths with other people. And sometimes because of these bumps the people within the spectrum like to stay close to you. These people become your friends and family, the ones who stay around you, the ones who are in the same general shade of grey as you are. If anyone, in my mind, ever existed in the exact same spot as you on the spectrum then they would understand you. Their mind would be in the exact same context as you. But I've never seen an example of that before. Instead I think they can understand parts of you and float around you, sometimes even aligning with you but never being in the exact same spot. And as of late I've come to realize how little I understand about my world around me and the friends I have in it. Before, when I imagined myself in this spectrum I imagined myself surround by my friends, aligned with a few but not all, and all of them just wandering in a general location near me. And now, when I think of it, I see no one in my general area. My friends are still there but when I think of them, they are miles away, too far away for either of us to reach each other. Too little understanding of each other. That's about it, the more I understand myself the more I understand that no one will understand me. And that's it, I just felt like raising an old flag.


And also, I am still happy. I realized how depressing that sounded, but it's not. And my friends, I love them. I may not understand them and they may not understand me but I love them either way.

Fin.

-Keshia

#55/100 Books in 2012: Specials by Scott Westerfeld