looking for myself

whenever i have a bad day or get a bit down on life and what i've chosen to do with mine, i've found that i typically have a very escapist type of mentality. this was made very clear to me when, at our last book club meeting, i went on a little rant about how i felt a connection with ernest hemingway in the sense that i will always see life as a pessimist who desperately wants a valid justification to be an optimist. i tend to always look at our existence as a hopeless decay. you grow old and appreciate simple beauty less, find it harder to laugh, you grow uglier, you body is constantly and slowly dying. as we grow older as a society and culture we see a deterioration of family values and simple courtesy. music and film culture is fed and grows on a hunger for mindless degenerate entertainment. as we step into the future we are leaving a trail of pollution behind and all that is beautiful about this earth is left trampled and destroyed by our 'trailblazing.' we are in the middle of a war and the strongest anti-war reactions seem to be more of a desire to have the image of being anti-war than any actual action to do anything about anything.
like i said, i would love to be an optimist if i saw truth in it. something that really got me thinking was a point tim made after i had put in my 2 cent bitch, the idea of hope. it is a hard one for someone like me because even now after writing all of that i am all fired up and am having a hard time remembering what he even said. if you read this tim, please leave a comment of some of the things we talked about that afternoon ya?
the escapist mentality comes when i try to deal with all of this, i usually resort to dreaming of moving off into the middle of no where with only my good, like-minded, friends and starting a farm/colonly that is completely self sufficient. a place where you don't have to deal with customer service and gas prices and bitchy little liberals and ignorant redneck conservatives and vampire weekend and credit cards and james dobson and cool and health insurance and on and on and on....
hope? hope.... hope ... hope
not caring is not an option. it never is and never will be for us. we care. we are affected. when i was younger i used to value my pessimism because i used to know how to harness it and it was something very powerful if i used to make myself fired up enough to do something. now i feel like i just get fired up and then burn out. so i don't think that being a pessimist is a bad thing. if you are not afraid to see the bad in life that can be very powerful but it can also make you a coward depending on how you deal with it.
see, tim still has this ability to dream in a very powerful and realistic way. he is so inspiring sometimes that it makes me sick, literally, there have been many many nights that i have not been able to sleep or eat because of things that he has said to inspire thought and emotion in me.
it seems that my only options are to either learn to become naive and not care anymore (not really an option) or to actually, trully start being a person of action and substance. this is the only way i will trully be able to at least feel whole. the hard thing about this is that it is something that starts small and in everyday life. it starts with how i choose to interact with the very next person i see. it starts with the painful stretching of muscles of selflessness and true concern for others, unused for so long now.