2001-10-18 - 2:18 p.m.

Well, unemployed life is less thrilling than I thought it would be. Still isolated, don't have to see Bones and Spirits, which is good, cause I hated the place, but on the other hand, my sole connection to the outside world is now gone as well, and no one's hiring until November. At least it gives me time to make nice with the restaurants I want to work at before they start culling the field, but honestly, I need money.

I'm starting to get my career going again, I'm just waiting for the auditions to start. The WTC has nearly killed the industry down here, so my struggle will be long and arduous. There are some non-paying movies casting down here, and I need the credit so I'll audition for them. Money would definately be nice. I wrote a letter of recommendation for Dr. Reid yesterday, got it sent off to NC for her evaluation. This means she'll write one for me for Yale, and it was good to praise her as she deserves.

Doing some thinking about martyrdom, specifically about the ultimate question regarding it: is it acceptable to be damned for doing good? Is it more important to safe-gaurd your own actions, and be ineffective but blameless, or to do whatever you have to for good to thrive? This is more than just 'the ends justify the means'. Let's take relationships as an example. You want to break up with someone, or don't want to date them in the first place: do you let them down easy, which can easily turn into stringing them along, or do you play the bastard and hurt them, which allows them to blame you, and get on with their lives? I'm thinking about this from having read the web-comic 'roomies', which is very interesting, and looks at the nature of morality as it evolves in the lives of several college students, in between finals and alien abductions (It's a web-comic, alright?). In it, a quasi-psychotic girl chases a weak-willed boy who doesn't want her. But he never actually makes a break, he tries desperately to keep her as a friend, which allows her to not have to reconsider herself and her actions. At one point, another friend correctly points out that the boy is using the girl as much as she uses him: he likes the admiration, the easy ego-boost that comes from being chased, and he's unwilling to let it go for both their sakes.

So my question is, when does our need to keep people as 'friends', so as not to hurt their feelings, become more about safe-gaurding our perceptions of ourselves as good people than about doing the right thing? I think there are two versions of morality being played out here: one false and based on appearances (a modern Victorianism) and the other the much harder path of jihad, of martyrdom, of struggle: the sword I think Jesus was talking about in his famous quote. Peace here is easy, and not really right: it lulls you into false comfort, it allows terrible things to happen, it is anything but authentic. The struggle to actually do the right thing, to create a basis for self-love, and self-respect, that's what's real. And sweet God is it tough.

And easily perverted. The bastards aboard the WTC flights, the people who blow themselves up in pizzarias, the people who use terrorism in its real ideological sense, they also claim this path. They commit acts of evil in the name of good. But that's exactly the opposite of the path I'm speaking of. On the path, you do right for it's own sake, regardless of the PR consequences, and this involves hurting people, at least emotionally, but superficially, and causes less hurt than the more peaceful option. The greater good for this path is encapsulated in the act itself, as opposed to the greater good of the terrorist, which is divorced from the act, and waits on the horizon for a day of redemption that honestly will not come.

I'm seeing a connection between Jihad, the Sword, and Sartre, but then, that's probably inevitable. I would like to work on reconcilling religion to existentialism, and I think this is an important step towards that. What do you think?

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