a particular word of advice for marriages apply to other relationships in life as well:

"if a marriage realizes that their conversations revolves around reminiscing past memories, then there is a problem. instead, the marriage should be creating new memories."

my environment should not dictate my behaviour, but i find myself seemingly devoid of the ability to create. i agree to that principle very much that i rarely think about the past. without either the past or new creation, it looks like i'm running out of options.

i was at my friend's fellowship a few weeks ago and someone came to me and prayed over me and said that i had these a great burden of expectations for myself that nobody would think was fair for me to have on myself. and he prayed that this burden would be taken away, and then i felt better. but i think about it now and i know that i still have a lot of expectations of myself. that i have to be at this certain level and not do a number of things and be constantly thinking of ways to improve and be super mature and it's sounding more and more like essentially changing the person that i am. it hurts somewhere between my chest and my stomach because i think that i have to change to become better but if i changed then i am abandoning all of me but then i won't be better.

curse the measuring sticks. dark lines of varying lengths spaced evenly apart. and sometimes the long lines were darker than the shorter lines. and there would be numbers under the longer lines, usually in increasing increments. oh, the bewilderment of measuring sticks with lines spaced not evenly apart; the length of the measuring stick is not linearly related to the spacing of the lines. that there isn't enough stick before all the lines are reached.

i play a game of polar opposites. it's like in grade school, when you like the girl, instead of actually telling the girl that you like her, you make fun of her and you punch her and you laugh at her. except not quite like that because that's only for grade school. how i play my game of polar opposites is that most people behave within a number of standard deviations of acceptable behaviours within a behaviour normal distribution. but i operate in the very corners of the distribution, and i operate damn well in them. but then it becomes a problem when everyone is in their big chunk of normal curve and there's no opportunity to pull out my corners. and when i do pull it out, then it would in contrast be highly inappropriate. and then i would lose out on the comedic timing and everyone would just think about how inappropriate i am. it would leave a bad taste in my mouth because i also do a damn good job being the classy right corner of the curve but nobody knows that.