maybe i didn't need to panic, but it was okay

i wanted to clarify my blurry line between fantasy and reality. i often quote bits of movies and books and pretend that they're real, but i don't literally believe that everything in the entire book is actually happening right then. for instance i said 'operation network corrupt' yesterday and that was a semi-joking, semi-pretend, semi-serious statement. another example was joking about how we're going to have a party at mark's house. i don't want people to take me too seriously, but yet, take me a little bit seriously. i use concepts from movies whenever they're relevant to the real situation, but a lot of it is just playfulness and pretending. if you actually interrogated me, i would clearly define which parts of it were literal truth and which parts were pretending.

i get scared when i see other people doing this, if it seems like they really mean it or if it's one of the dangerous concepts that you wouldn't WANT to be true in reality. one of the things that had me really scared yesterday was mark mentioning the matrix, and i wasn't sure how much of it he meant as a metaphor concept, versus how much of it was like literal truth to him.

i don't like to see these ideas:

1. that some people are so inhuman that it's okay to kill them. it was unusual for me to be mentioning 'psychopaths' and 'sociopaths' the other day because i had stopped using those words: they label somebody in a way that makes them seem inhuman. there are lots of times when people seem so evil that they are almost not human, but i don't want anyone to go from there to believing in killing people. i think that that's something you only should do in self-defense, like if someone attacks you in a dark alley, that kind of thing, and you have to fight immediately to stay alive. the rest of the time, you might see someone doing something evil, but you can't tell for sure if they did it of their own free will, if it was an accident, if perhaps they're able to change that behavior if you pointed it out to them versus something unchangeable about them, etc. there is so much that you can't know for sure just by seeing somebody do a horrible thing or a cruel thing. there is so much to interpret and understand that i am cautious about judging them as evil.

2. that it's okay for yourself to die, or that you won't really die if you do something dangerous. i got scared yesterday because i wasn't sure how bad it was. should i take him literally, that he literally believes this is a computer matrix and that if you jump off a building, you might not really die, or else you might enter some alternate reality afterwards (or heaven - yes, i am an atheist), or you might have superhuman powers. i know mark doesn't just believe stuff like that, however i also didn't know if he had been on drugs - perhaps involuntarily. so anyway i get scared sometimes if i see people mentioning things from the matrix movie, even though i myself love that movie and i mention things from it too.

so i might have been overreacting when i panicked. at the same time, mark was grateful for the friendship and support and he really did need it at that moment. if you read the blog about what those people did, ganging up on him at work, without even being tolerant of the fact that maybe he just doesn't fit in or act exactly like everybody else does at that office, then yes, it makes you angry.

i usually don't feel like i fit in either, and i usually feel like people don't understand me very well.

i don't have a lot of time to write right now.