being sober 3

another sober day. i feel extremely tired in the morning though. i need coffee. i need artificial stimulants, substitutes for alcohol. i'm trying not to buy little coffees, donuts here and there. it's really this need for immediate gratification that's killing me. it sounds so harmless, but... i saw the wolf of wall street a month ago. was completely disgusted. walked out, but i'm not so different. if i had that much money, i might do the same. the wolf is actually still a kid. he has never grown up. he satisfies all his desires and he thinks that that's what life is all about. but life will eat you up if you do that. you are literally having sex with life.

so these days, i buy a dozen coffees at costco. i drink them in the morning without going to dunkin. or i make my own coffee when i'm not lazy enough. my 42 year old body is catching up to me.

it also occurs to me that alcohol is also related with discomfort with my sexuality. in another sense, it is really only the beautiful who are allowed to be sexual. but to get to the point, during my teenage years, i drank at parties to waive off my fear of rejection from the other sex. i don't understand why i did that when they most likely would have rejected me anyway. so alcohol made me feel that i would be less rejected since it made me funny i wouldn't have to take my rejection so seriously. that was when wasps were the predominant population in charlotte nc.

so alcohol was built into my life... it was built into my discomfort with sexuality, it made me feel less discomfort, it was built into my work, if i did well, i rewarded myself with drinking, if i failed, i blamed myself and drank as a consolation prize, it also became one of my motivators for work, like bad gas that kept my engine humming... soon, i was drinking all the time and life became a zero sum game. i did not care if i was doing well or not, i just cared that i was drinking.

so i need new motivators. i need to take out all the parts of my life that alcohol had taken over and replace it with real, lasting motivators or comfortizers. yet, comfort is the enemy of progress often. must be careful.

proverbs and psalms from the bible provide some real pleasure and comfort for me. it comforts me to know that david was bipolar. so many bipolars end up alcoholics and drug addicts. i don't want to be a statisitic. proverbs helps me to keep good work habits. psalms makes me feel understood by god.

the real problem is that i feel no pleasure in life. i don't feel pleasure in reading most books either. i can't read virginia woolf without being bored. i used to read her rapturously. movies... they are not really for adults. i can't think political correctness is an "adult" thing either. people are really deceiving themselves thinking that language has that much power. just because you use nice words and say nice things about everyone, doesn't mean that you're not a sexist or a racist. it's actions that matter. look at the statistics. there's still all sorts of quotas and reverse-quotas to control the % of minorities or women. at the same time, it is not the western male that's the enemy.

once there were jew hating jews, once there were black hating blacks....am i a yellow hating yellow, a korean hating korean? I used to be... i was ashamed of being Korean and Americans supported this point of view and did this contribute to my drinking? yes. but now, i realize that the space of real excitement is actually somewhere in between, here you can create yourself. you don't have to be korean and you don't have to be american. between the stimulus and the response is your choice. steven covey always talked about that but now i understand. most korean americans are korean with koreans and americans with americans and they live with a cultural schizophrenia in their souls. i don't want to live like that. 1st generation koreans who treat their girls like princesses seem to see no relationship between jewish american princesses and their kids. it's almost insane how history repeats itself repeatedly and people who are so many of the same concerns despise each other.

but back to being sober.