No more.

"NAME YOURSELF, GUNSLINGER."
"Roland of Gilead, son of Steven. Who speaks to me?"
"GILEAD IS NO MORE," the voice mused, ignoring the question. Roland looked up and saw patterns of concentric rings in the ceiling. The voice was coming from those.
"NO GUNSLINGER HAS WALKED IN-WORLD OR MID-WORLD FOR ALMOST THREE HUNDRED YEARS."
"I and my friends are the last."

I can do great things when I'm angry. I can do great things when I've had enough. Sometimes, it's the only way I can do certain things.

Six years ago, I didn't have any female friends. At least, none that were all that close, and certainly none that I really chose. Five years ago, when I graduated and came to college, I got a couple. Probably no more than two or three. Four years ago, that began to change. I actually chose a few female friends. Perhaps maybe a third of my friends were girls. Then three years ago, it was half. Two years ago, my male friends diminished significantly. Now beginning a year ago, I have really only one or two close male friends, and a bunch of female friends.

No. More.

As that pattern had changed, I considered it a fluke. I mused that the population of women in Bowling Green was skewed, and the population at St. Tom's even more increasingly skewed over the years. Of course I would have more lady friends. Right?

But no. Somehow, somewhere along the line I really began to prefer the company of women over men. And somehow, I failed to see what a problem it has caused me.

On another note, I am very sick of the kindergarten baby crap that the opposite sex has put me through as I have earnestly and honestly pursued romantic relationships over the years. I have tried lots of separation, little separation, lots of communication, no communication, high speed, low speed, NO speed, I'M DONE! I have put myself through hell trying to be the kind of man who deserves a good woman, only to discover that most women just have no clue what they want and don't deserve a guy like me. I have no qualms about saying that. I really have done a great job in pursuing relationships in an open, honest, christian manner, and I'm through with it.

From now on, I am only going to seek the friendship of my fellow men. Sure, I will hang out with women if they ask...but ONLY if they ask. That should suffice to comfort whatever female friends I still have. Furthermore, I am not even going to think about dating for as long as I feel like not thinking about it.

Why? I have many, many reasons.

1. Girls get closest to other girls, guys get closest to other guys. Here I've been, stuck in no man's land. I tried to become best friends with girls, but it would never work. I could never be as close to a girl as another girl. And all the time, I wouldn't be invited to spend time with girls because they were having girl time and I was a guy. And I wouldn't be invited to guy time because I wasn't hanging out with guys so they wouldn't think to invite me. THIS WAS A VERY, VERY LONELY EXISTENCE.
2. I have been emasculated. I think because I've hung out with girls so much, I got used to it. So did girls. I became one of the girls, instead of a guy hanging out with girls. I can only get masculinity from hanging out with guys. I want that back.
3. On a similar note, I think it's made me unattractive to women. I'm really not sure how it all works but I don't care. I still think I ought to be married someday, and something is not right about hanging out with women all the time and not getting anywhere all this time. Time to try something different.
4. Similar to number one, I have had such bad experiences with female friendships. My best friend at one point was a girl. Now, she ignores me and doesn't even have the decency to tell me why. I literally have no clue what I did. I've noticed most of my female friends are always too busy to hang out and don't really ask me to come over or anything, which sucks because a one-sided friendship isn't really a friendship at all.
5. Hanging out with guys used to be fun. It can be fun again. I remember having great times TPing and playing Mario Kart with my guy friends in high school. To this day, I laugh a lot more with the few remaining guy friends I have than with women. Women tend not to be as funny as guys. And laughing is such a cure for anything. It would be nice to bust a gut when I'm feeling down instead of talking about it with girls and just eventually realizing there is no solution and feeling worse.

So, yeah. I'm not going to talk, text, invite, or otherwise seek the company of women. If any of my friends are offended by this, then let it be so. You had your chance to seek me out, and you still do. I won't say no to hanging out with anyone, I never have and never will. But I have to do what is right for me. Even more, I have to do what is right. I am angry, and justly angry, and it is my anger that is enabling me to finally do this right thing, even though it is hard. I will have justice for myself and Christ who leads me to this. No one can stop me.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for masculinity.

What is owed.

Nobody really owes me anything.

These days I am a very angry person. The anger is my own fault. It comes from my sense of entitlement - people ought to treat me this way. People ought to give me this or that consideration. People ought to do this or that. But I find myself inevitably and totally disappointed.

I know that I complain a lot. If you disagree, fine. I complain a lot in my head, then. My head is a mess of accusations. How dare she! How dare he! How dare they! They know better! Well, that is my standard. I can't control anyone but myself.

It is so difficult for people to put themselves in other people's shoes. This is the root of many interpersonal problems. People just don't get what it's like. At the same time as I do something I feel justified, someone does the same thing to me, and I feel it categorically unjust. But yet, if I am honest, I know they must have some justification known only to themselves.

I take today as an example. Rejection is something I find difficult to justify in almost any situation - utter rejection, without consideration. It angers me. In movies I will cheer on the most rejected character of the story. I can't help but love them and want to see them do well. That is my empathy.

So, today, I was rejected. That is the only detail necessary in telling this story for the purposes of my moral. I was rejected in the same way that I know I will someday soon reject someone else. I know that I have my justifications for it, and feel them good enough. But, were I to explain it to the rejectee they would likely consider it a very weak excuse. So the same in reverse. Today, I was rejected, and the reasoning I heard was utter tripe, in my personal opinion. Bah, I thought. Utter bull. Their excuse is not at all consideration as they say. But I must put this on myself. I know. Hypocrite.

I am not owed consideration. I am not owed consideration from the person who I spoke to today. I am not owed consideration by my friends. I am not owed anything. No one ought to do anything for me or with me. That is not the same as should, in the moral sense. Of course I have been maltreated, just as I have maltreated others.

Everything I have given as a friend has been a gift, not an obligation. I have given time, tears, and energy. I do not believe I have been given the same. That makes me somewhat angry - but what makes me even angrier is knowing that I am not really owed what I am demanding, and that the person I should really be angry at is myself, for demanding it.

Damn it!

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for release from obligation.

The good choice.

What is the greatest thing to be achieved in this life?

Often times, putting the needs of others over your own can be difficult. I cannot say it is the easiest thing to do to sit on your hands and do nothing so that others may live in comfort - because by acting on your own desires, you may impede theirs...either for their own hopes, or their own comforts. And that is often what I must do.

How can I call myself a friend if I don't act like a friend should? My friendship doesn't end as soon as I want more. No, I can only choose to be a good friend, and nothing more. Everything else will follow, and it will either be what I want or it will be something better:

"...We do not always have to foresee every possibility. We have only to judge whether the act is right, just, and accords with the truth and love here and now, because we "believe in the good" and are therefore convinced that, whatever consequences may follow, they will certainly be good ones, beneficial to ourselves and to society." - Thomas Merton

...And so as Merton says, I go on, doing whatever good I believe I can in my friendships. Even if it means not being as close of a friend as I would like. Even if it kinda hurts to say nothing where I would really like to.

This is why I dislike when menboys go after girls who have only recently broken off a relationship. They need time, and they're so selfish they won't give them any. I believe they call it "catching her on the rebound" and it's little more than emotional manipulation. It's disgusting.

What is the greatest thing to be achieved in this life? It is to be a virtuous person, I think. Truly virtuous...and to have that quality is worth everything. I would go as far as to say that it is better to die a good man than to live as a cheater, liar, thief, or murderer. It's to never give in to the easy path, even over the smallest thing...it's to say "never!" when evil comes and calls.

I'll never join you!

That's what that choice is. Selfish, and therefore evil. Even if it seems trivial to some people, you can never be a virtuous person if you make exceptions for even the smallest evils.

So, never. I say never.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream to do good always.

The pay-off.

In human action and interaction, there is rarely, if ever, any sort of arbitrariness. There is always a "point" to it...something I am trying to "get" or "achieve."

It is a dangerous business to always go through life without examining what kind of pay-off I am trying to get from my actions. "What is the point of what I'm doing?" I must ask if I truly wish to be a person of virtue.

I have become aware, recently, of how lax I have been in checking myself for these pay-offs. I thank God that I know I'm being an arrogant fool sometimes. It comes out in a few of these posts. While it may be true I feel like a Jedi when I counsel people, I think it is true I tell people so not for any reason other than because I want their approval, which is a very silly reason. If I am to be someone who only cares how God judges me, that's not really the way to go about it.

Even while I am being more vigilant in my awareness of why I am doing what I'm doing I know that I must have blind spots. This is why I have decided I need to make sure I am getting plenty of virtuous friendships. The path to righteousness was never intended, I believe, to be taken alone. This is why I am very grateful for the friendship of a man I will refer to as G.

G and I only met this year, and I must say at first I was a bit annoyed at him. Not because I didn't appreciate his sense of humor and found him a bore, but because I was so unused to not having to work to make friends with someone that I found it almost irritating. But I am grateful I decided to throw this aside and give it a shot. G is a great Catholic man, and even though he seems awkward and timid to the unobservant, in reality he is definitely not afraid to ask me the tough questions. "Do you think you're reading too much into it?" He asked the other day as I told him a guy-to-guy story. I thought briefly and answered "yes" because of course I was.

I appreciated this probably more than I let on to G, because I need friends like him to alert me to my blind spots. Someone to sharpen my iron, to use the Pauline phrase. I know I can count on G to help me grow in virtue, because I can tell that even more than he likes to have fun with me, I know he wants to grow closer to Christ, and help me in that, too.

G is, of course, not the only virtuous friendship I have. I could mention a few others, some of whom are probably my readers (I believe there are about 8 people who regularly keep up with this blog in any regular fashion, and I have perhaps indulgently assumed these are my closest associates). However, G is a great example of what I hope to have more of. I find I am increasingly less interested in idle amusement in my friendships, and more and more interested in learning something from them. This is what attracts me most to a person: their wisdom that I so desperately need!

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for a virtuous pay-off.

The lost virtues.

"Might have to go where they don't know my name...Float all over the world...just to see her again! And I won't show or fear any pain, even though all my armor might rust in the rain! A simple plot...but I know one day...good things are coming our way."
-Coldplay, "Up With the Birds"

I have been wanting to write about something for a long time.

I have a friend I've known since high school. Often when I think of this friend I regress emotionally to the level of a little girl. It's embarrassing to admit but I say this for a reason.

I've spent my entire life doing a lot of things. I think the most profound of these is my own quest for power - Power over myself.

I have lived a life lacking integrity. I've lived in fear and despair.  I was brought up to hate myself and to fear those I lived with. I never thought anything would get better.

My mother was the only person in my family I could really talk to. I lost her at 16. I really didn't appreciate her as I should...she really let me take a lot out on her. The guilt of it stayed with me for a long time. I'm still getting over it.

My friend in high school...well, she has had some kind of strange affect on me. I haven't seen her in years, but I've never been able to forget about her. I still worry about her, and I don't know why.

A long time ago, she shared a lot about her life with me. She has had a very hard life. She had a lot of trust issues with males, but for whatever reason she gave me hers. I blew it. I was impatient with her and said some stupid things I really wish I could take back. We're still friends, technically. But it's been so hard to stay in touch with her. There have been periods many months long where I lost all contact.

She's not the only friend I've betrayed either. With my year and a half long hermitage lasting over my sophomore and junior year of college, I really lost a lot of friendships that I've never really been able to get back.

Trouble is, I never really wanted to do any of these things. I knew what I was doing was stupid and I did it anyway. I lacked integrity.

What's more is, I lacked courage to do what was right. There are so many people in my life who could have benefited from me having the courage to say something they really needed to hear...or, I could have benefited from saying or doing something to make a change in my life.

And over all, my lack of hope for change made me unable to develop any of these virtues.

I have so much regret. I could have made it clear to my mother how much I loved her. I could have made a difference in my friend's life. I could have matched my thoughts to my actions and been responsible with my time...and not been a bad friend.

On a cold November night in 2009, I got a phone call that made me snap. I totally lost it. It took me three months to really get over what I heard on that phone. What I was told made me realize all at once how lost I really was. I'm not really even sure if it was all due to that phone call, but I have to place the start of my change somewhere, and I guess that's it. Maybe I'll never know how or when, but somehow, it happened. My lost virtues...just sort of came.

I know a lot of people probably feel the same way, but the band Coldplay seems to write songs about me. The songs...just get it. How I feel.

How I "Might have to go where they don't know my name...

How I would love to just "Float all over the world...just to see her again!"

How I'm determined not to "show or fear any pain, even though all my armor might rust in the rain!"

It's "A simple plot...but I know one day...good things are coming our way."

I only hope that maybe someday, I can look back on my life and really believe that I made up for what I failed to do because of who I was. That I can say I lived a life of integrity, courage, and hope.

I hope.

Seagulls, my favorite animal, in a picture particularly applicable to this post

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for hope, courage, and integrity to be renewed.

My agoge.

"At age 7, as is customary in Sparta, the boy was taken from his mother and plunged into a world of violence. Manufactured by 300 years of Spartan warrior society, to create the finest soldiers the world has ever known. The agoge, as it's called, forces the boy to fight."

I feel like I'm going through this in a very spiritual way...my own agoge, at least as depicted in the movie 300.

I feel like I've been left out in the cold in more than just a -5 degrees sort of way like it was this morning. God has really left me to stand on my own two feet. He sure chose a strange time to do it, from my limited perspective.

I'm tired. Just plain tired. Except in rare moments often involving my amazing girlfriend I find it very hard to hold a smile for very long. I'm running out of patience with anyone and everything. I'm hurt by small things. I'm more tempted by things I used to be strong against. I can't do a lot of things right anymore. I'm under attack.

I'm facing a duel to the death with the Deceiver and I'm starting to lose stamina.

If there's one thing I hate since my conversion, it's being a disappointment. I feel more assured with my girlfriend that I'm doing OK with her because of her constant patient reminders, but I still feel that I'm not doing all I can in many other ways. I want to become who I was born to be, but now God has taken off the training wheels and I'm in a wreck. I need to get stronger, I need to persist, I need to fight, I need to win! I can not and will not fail again. To me there is only greatness in the eyes of God or failure.

I take back what I said about God choosing a strange time to do this to me. God knows me well enough to know how I feel about victories. It's the most hopeless fights that are the greatest victories, and the most unexpected victories that are the most glorious. And right now, I feel that I'm fighting a losing battle. If I can just persist long enough, maybe I'll survive my agoge. God has forced me into battle, and that's fine. I'll fight if I have to.

I go in and out of fascination with the movie 300. It's violent and has nudity in it, but sometimes when I remember major themes and amazing lines in the movie I feel differently:

"'Remember us.' As simple an order as a king can give. 'Remember why we died.' For he did not wish tribute, nor song, nor monuments nor poems of war and valor. His wish was simple. 'Remember us,' he said to me. That was his hope, should any free soul come across that place, in all the countless centuries yet to be. May all our voices whisper to you from the ageless stones, 'Go tell the Spartans, passerby, that here by Spartan law, we lie.'"

Christ, our King calls us to die to ourselves, to join in the battle against Satan and give our lives up for his sake. "Remember me," I hear from Calvary. How can I forget His sacrifice?

Here I am, left in spiritual desolation for only a month or so and already I've run out of energy. Well forget it. I'll run on empty for as long as it takes to complete my mission in life. That's the end of it.

There was a dream that I dreamed, and that dream was for victory in spiritual battle.

Someone believed in me.

I'm currently being interviewed in a reporting class about the time I was awarded the Bishop's Cross.

It's been an interesting revisit of something I don't always think about. The Bishop's Cross is an award given in the Toledo Diocese to two Catholic students (one boy, one girl) from each high school in the diocese upon graduation every year. It's based upon (perceived) moral character, involvement in the parish and community, and high religion GPA.

All I know beyond that is that there is a committee that nominates and votes on the winners. There is no application to fill out, and no way to find out who nominated me. Someone thought I would be a good candidate and the committee that gives out the award voted in agreement. I, who only did the things he did to feel that he wasn't completely wasting his life. I, who fought for every little bit of motivation to go to church every week. I, who never had a regular prayer life. I, who was secretly precarious in belief at best and an unconscious atheist at worst many times in high school. I, who was not of the moral fiber that anyone believed I was.

I was elated to receive the Bishop's Cross, but at the same time I felt they had made a mistake. People at graduation thought they saw a smile on my face when they called my name, but it was actually a look of surprise. It was surprise, because I knew what I looked like on the inside. I felt they awarded it based on my public face, which was a lie. I didn't deserve it.

Yet, someone believed in me. Someone saw in me something I could not. My potential...who I was born to be. I am reminded constantly of how far I have to go, but it remains true that I have come far already. In the some of the most worthless times of my life, someone thought I deserved an award that I think I have only come to deserve nearly four years later.

Over the past four years of college, I've been haunted by that award. I was only getting worse at times, and it was only when I hit rock bottom that I got better. I never felt at ease when I remembered getting that award, until now. Now, the emotion is not guilt but a sense of overwhelming gratitude.

Gratitude to that one person who believed in me when I did not believe in myself.

There was a dream that I dreamed, and that dream was that everyone could believe in their own goodness.