People think we live in only one world. We don’t. We travel through many worlds in our lifetimes. We each go to many different places. Usually you travel easily between worlds without even the slightest pause. Sometimes you don’t even realize when you’ve passed from one world to another and you only look back and see that this place you are at is wholly different than where you once were.

But sometimes you get to a new world and there’s a barrier. It’s a person dressed all in black, face covered by a dark hood, and hands folded over his or her chest. Imposing. Forbidding.

You try to walk on in to your new world but he’ll have none of it. He holds up a warning hand and shakes his head disapprovingly. Perhaps you try to sneak by him, only to be tossed out on your rear. Perhaps you try to bargain with him or reason with him, only to be rebuffed without sympathy. Perhaps you try to flatter him or deceive him, but he is not fooled.

Finally in annoyance you shout at him “WHY!?!? Why can’t I be a part of that world!?!?”

And he’ll tell you. Oh he’ll definitely tell you. He’ll do so matter of factly as if surprised that you did not ask long ago. But what he’ll say will be different for each person and for each world denied.

For me, far too often, he says this:

“You’re too nice.”

That’s it. A life time’s worth of possibilities denied by those three simple words. Again and again and again I encounter them. “You’re too nice.” I’ve heard it eight times in the last two weeks.  Yes I keep count.  What does that even mean? How can someone be too nice? It’s stupid. You’d think selflessness were a crime. Shall I lie and cheat and steal and randomly punch strangers, curse people out, steal candy from babies, and mock and insult people regularly for the slightest most trivial things? How often should I do it? Act like an ass every other day? Or is once a week enough? Or maybe one mean and/or selfish act every day? Will people find that behavior more acceptable? wtf why? I don’t understand this expectation of cruelty. It pisses me off.

So one day perhaps you’ll be annoyed at your guardian’s answer as I am of mine. Maybe you’ll be more than annoyed. Maybe you’ll get frustrated and angry and enraged and you’ll leap at your guardian kicking and screaming, wrestling him to the ground, determined to beat the motherfucker to a bloody pulp and then travel to that damned world anyway. Ironic if your barrier is kindness.

But as you fight your guardian’s hood will fall back and you’ll see in his eyes your eyes reflected in your eyes reflected in your eyes again and again in infinite regression. And then your vision will slowly expand and you’ll be lying on the floor all alone. And then you’ll realize that there is no guardian. There never was.

There’s only you.

So I’m going to start using nephyo on gmail as my primary email address. Just thought I’d update any of you xangans who happen to exchange email communications with me.

Yeah in case you couldn’t guess I’m nephyo everywhere. I have yet to encounter a nephyo on all the five corners of the internet who is not me. 

And if you steal the username nephyo I will hunt you down and stick burning brands into your eyes setting them aflame within your skull and then douse them by throwing you into a river with iron weights strapped to your chest.  

And if somehow you survive that… then I’ll start to get mean. ^_^

I don’t have any special powers. There’s no weird unique awareness of the world around me that I was gifted with. I don’t get “feelings”. I don’t sense people’s emotions, or read minds not with any degree of accuracy at least. My hunches are perpetually always wrong. And truly my five regular sense are fully below average and a sixth sense is entirely beyond me.

I’ve never seen a ghost, nor suspected that I have. The dead have never communicated with me in any way shape or form. Certainly not demons, angels, spirits, monsters, gods or goddesses either. I don’t commune with nature. Nature is well… just there. I don’t get this sense of being a part of anything bigger than me when I stare at a storm or off a mountain top. Instead, I go… “eh”.

I can’t think of any one single spiritual experience I have ever had in my entire life. Nothing profound. Nothing amazing. Aliens haven’t kidnapped me. Robotic demons haven’t taken over my brain. I can’t secretly move objects with my mind or teleport or control the forces of magnetism. And no I don’t fly either. Invulnerability, regeneration? Ha! Well if weeping like a baby when I stub my toe is a super power… then maybe I have that.

Nope. I don’t even dream. Not prophetic dreams. Not even entertaining dreams. Certainly not recurrent dreams. Those few times I have dreamed and remembered it I had to write it down and I’ve completely forgotten them since writing them. I could not recount to you the contents of any single dream I’ve ever had in my entire life. I’d have to look one up in my journals if you wanted me to tell you about them. And even in those journals there are passing few dreams. Probable no more than a dozen in my entire life time.  So generally I just tell people that I don’t dream.

I virtually never get deja vu. I never see any sight that makes a shiver go down my spine. Nothing special like that.

Everything just… is… to me. It’s what it appears to be. It’s right there. I don’t see anything special about the universe. There’s great beauty and wonder sure, but it’s just itself.

So if you pressed me and forced me answer the quest of do I believe in the supernatural, I’d have to say “No”.  I don’t believe in the supernatural. The term doesn’t make any sense to me.

But I do believe in the unusual and the unexpected and the hard to explain. The things most people *call* supernatural. I don’t believe they do exist I just believe that it is possible for them all to exist. It’s just that even if they do exist, they aren’t supernatural to me. If they exist then they just are. Just like everything else.  All things are a part of nature. Whether or not science has a reasonable or rational explanation for them yet.

And it doesn’t really bother me either or excite me. The idea of the weird or the supernatural. If suddenly zombies came out of the Earth and dragons flew from the heavens and it started raining flying pigs I’d probably look at it all and say “oh well that’s new” and then shrug and go “eh”.

You know it’s funny but in spite of this attitude, I seem to make a lot of weird friends. I mean I’m constantly running into people and befriending people who have had supernatural experiences. People who will tell me about them. Some of them aren’t even willing to tell anybody else about them. But they share with me their stories. I’ve got no clue why. They tell me all about the odd things that are happening in their lives, the weird coincidences and the strange opinions they have that most people would look at them funny if they were to voice them. It’s always been this way for me.

So many of my friends have instincts or sense emotions or develops feelings that point them in certain directions. So many of my friends are also the people who tend to be somewhat outside of the norm in terms of behavior and/or perspective and/or beliefs (indeed you can chart the course of the depth of my connection with people as being inversely proportional to the degree to which they conform to social norms – people tend to talk to me less as they integrate more into society). My friends tend to be the people who see the world differently. They’re the people who *know* deep down that there’s more to the world than what we see and hear and who reject sometimes forcefully the limited perspective of others.

My Mom too is like that. She’s talked to me about some of her spiritual experiences. Things that have happened to her that make her believe that there has to be something bigger and larger than us. A God or something like that. And there’s littler things too. Like whenever I would come home to visit unannounced she would say something like “I got this feeling that you were going to come home today”.  And when something is bothering me even if I’m not in the same state, she seems to know. It’s weird.

So friends and family who I am close to all seem to have a kind of specialness to them that they share with me. I don’t seek out being around these people. It seems wholly random how I meet them and get to know them. I don’t get it. But it’s happened time and again.

I don’t disbelieve any of them either. I can’t explain what they are experiencing and I can’t relate to it nor do I even pretend to. But I’m sure there is something that they are experiencing. I don’t doubt their word. I just remain uncertain as to whether what they have experienced is really what they think they experienced. Don’t get me wrong, it could be. And in the absence of any other viable explanation, I’ll take my friends words about it. After all they’ve experienced it. I haven’t. Who am I to say that I know more than they?

But I’m not like them. Not at all. I don’t have any senses or feelings or instincts to trust. Whenever I’ve tried to guess at something more, the results have been disastrous. So I must conclude, that I just really *don’t* have any special powers that provide me with more information. So I only trust my logic. My reasoning. And it’s never failed me.

Oh in spite of this I still consider myself a Sorcerer (not a wizard, magus, spellcaster, magician, warlock, druid or anything like that. a sorcerer, get it right!). And I’ve managed to come up with a spell or two which I wield when the going gets tough!  Watch out for them! ^_^

I had a debate last night while watching the end of a random marathon of the TV show House. The topic, if there ever really was a Doctor like House, should the hospital have booted him out a long time ago or should he have been allowed to stay?

I argued the side of keeping House, but I have to admit I haven’t seen a whole lot of episodes of that show. So I though I’d ask the rest of you, if you happen to have ever seen that show, for your opinion. 

So does House deserve his job? What do you think?

I haven’t written anything on here in a while so that’s why I’m blogging now. What could be more fun than blogging when I have absolutely nothing to say? Ha! But it’s not like I often have much to say and that never stopped me before from writing a novel’s worth of rambling ranting nonsense.  That you’re here, reading, must mean that that’s what you like. There’s no accounting for taste you know.

Well things are going well for me. I’m sort of in the middle of a mini-vacation semi-planned that turned out completely different from what I expected it would. But it’s been fun. I’ve been getting to know a fascinating person and doing lots of interesting things. The trip to a zoo/conservation. Watching movies. Lots of fascinating restaurants and new foods I’ve never tried before. Shopping. A drive across the state. An anime convention. And of course spending far more money than I really ought to be spending. But then hey that’s what vacations are for right?   It’s worth it.

I have this feeling like life is going to get a lot more complicated for me soon. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The simplicity has been getting a bit boring anyways.  

And overall I guess the really important thing is that it just feels damnably good to be able to help a friend. And to know with a certainty that the people I care about are really alright. It’s a huge weight lifted off my shoulders to not have to be left in ignorance worrying all the time. Oh I still worry, about far far too many things. But it’s more livable now.