A moral choice by an addict

This morning I walked with my sister to the bus stop. I had already decided this yesterday because yesterday we took a 20 to 40 (to and from) to a job fair thing. Anyways, the walk did me some good and kept energized and in a great spirit. So today we walked and kind of got into a heated discussion. I'll talk about that first, then I'll tell you about the man I spoke to afterwards.

I noticed one of our cats was quite light and I could feel his spine when I rubbed him (I leave him being fed to my sister), so I gave him some food (a cup) and on the way to the bus stop I told my sister she would need to increase his food intake. She starts to say things like "He eats enough" or "he'll just eat it all anyways" and she was completely missing the point despite the fact that I kept trying to explain to her what she was failing to get.

I ended up just telling her I'm upset and to stop talking to me while we walked the rest of the way. She then says that I'm blowing the whole thing out of proportion. And this is the very reason why I find it difficult to talk to her. It never ceases to not make me become upset haha she just DOESN'T get it, no matter how hard someone tries to explain things to her.

So that was that. In the end she says "Well I said I'll feed him more" and by this point I was too fed up with the fact that she wasn't really getting it. She said that it was my own personal opinion that the cat wasn't being fed enough. I told her that it's not an OPINION but fact that he is indeed light and needs to eat more. She even said that he was light when she picked him up yesterday and I'm questioning if she thinks that's normal. It's clearly FACT that he needs to eat more. He's either sick or not getting enough food, but I truly believe it's the latter. I seriously wasn't trying to turn the discussion into an argument, and I simply stated how I came to the obviously conclusion that he was needs to eat more. My sister is under the impression that he eats enough and so she only gives him enough food to cover the bottom of his bowl.

Seriously? Do you see why I became upset? hahaha

Anyways, I went to Burger King when we made it to the bus stop. She left soon after and I stopped at Walgreens. On my way out a man standing near the entrance ask if I can spare anything and I told him I didn't have anything, and started to walk away. But suddenly a thought came to me. I  walked back and asked him if he was hungry. It didn't occur to me that he could be homeless. Honestly, homelessness and people begging is so common in Chicago it isn't even funny.

Before I go on I'll give you my thoughts on this situation. In the past, when I first started going to school downtown, whenever I would see homeless people I would feel sad. I would often give them a buck or change if I had it. And it made me happy. But then I realized that there are homeless people and there are addicts. For me, honestly, they started to blend together and it was tough for me to tell the difference. Then I saw a youtube video of a girl who was pretending to be disabled, even though she was perfectly fine, in order to make easy money.

This appalled me, and I began to wonder exactly who am I truly giving my money to. I tried to tell myself that it's up to that person on what they'll do with the money. But I didn't want to fund someone's addictions either. And if the person is truly homeless, and I really helping?

These conflicted me and I stopped giving as much. Regardless, the tough thing is that I DON'T know the person's story at all. It's easy for people to assume, but that person is still someone who lived a life and dealt with things.

So back to the story. I go to the man and ask him if he's hungry, and he says no and tells me that he's honestly just trying to get money to take the "edge" off, and instantly I'm thinking "yeah I wouldn't fund that", but had he not told me, and I DID have a dollar or something, I would've gave it to him. Geez.

Anyway, I say he made a moral choice because he started to tell me what happened to him yesterday. He said he got really drunk and exchanged his real money for counterfeit money but couldn't distinguish it from fake money due to being drunk (fifty dollars to be exact, he even let me check it). He then tells me how he asked a man for money, and the person gave him $3 and he told the person he was going to buy beer and the person told him to give him his money back. Which he did.

That struck me and I said "At least you were honest."

I thought that somehow, this person who wanted to get high and wanted to buy beer, he honestly told someone what he was going to do with it. He even told me what he would do with the money he was planning to get from others, if any.I wished him a good day and left.

Honestly, I was confused and perplexed. Then I started to think if, the thoughts I was thinking, to tell him that he should get off the streets, or that if he got the money, he should do something good with it, am I really helping?

The reason I say this is because of this recently incident with a celebrity. Demi Lovato. She's been going through rehab, and addiction, and she had money and can fund drugs without having to ask anyone. I'm sure countless people have told her to stop. She even knew herself that she should stop. I started to wonder if that man knew it did him no good to do the things hes doing. And if so, what's the point in me telling him something he already knows? To remind him? Reminders are good.

But he also HAD $50 at one point. More than enough for him to do with it what he will. So maybe there's more to his story, because he wasn't completely broke until someone tricked him.

The "normal" thing to do would to just ignore him altogether, right? And honestly, I was planning to, but if I did, I wouldn't have gotten stuck in thought. I don't think helped him, but I also think I did just purely given my circumstances.

I didn't have any money left, and so I didn't help him get beer, or whatever else he was planning to do with it. He seemed to be honest enough, and I want to say it's a shame that he's doing what he's doing, but honestly, who am I to say that he isn't exactly where he's suppose to be....however unusual that sounds.

Here's what I mean...and I hope it makes a little bit of sense. There are people in the world who do questionable things. For example, some people who are strippers, don't mind being strippers. To me I find the act overall to be a bit gaudy, but that's my opinion. And I'm one who believes people should be free to do what they please as long as they're not hurting anyone.

Some people are addicts, they know it's bad, and sometimes they're actually pretty smart people.

I think the part that bothers me about people who are addicts is that they're destroying their bodies. And, I could argue with myself that aren't I destroying by body by eating this Burger King meal? Anything could kill us, it's just that they're choosing what kills them. The same goes for people who smoke. I'm against smoking, I even took a cigarette from a classmate and threw it one the ground when he was about to have a smoke (seriously I don't know what I was thinking because he could've been very angry, but I think we were cool, and so he didn't really mind).

I don't quite know what I'm trying to say other than the fact that I'm torn between morally right and morally wrong, because it seems that there could be right in the wrong and that what seems wrong may only be a little wrong, but only kind of.

I'll tell you that I started to think about Jesus and Mary Magdalene and how she was said to be a prostitute (although looking that up now it seems some people are doubtful to this common belief. Regardless, had Jesus saw this man, what would he say? Would he have judged him and told him that what he was doing what wrong?

Geez, I think the most difficulties I'm having with this are the gray areas of life. Not everyone will walk the road of being a saint, or being holy. They exist, the people who live lives that are considered dark, possibly for us to probably not help, but for us to understand...or something.

I read a book once (by this point in my blogs, this is a common phrase by me) that spoke about people being regressed into past lives. One woman spoke about a life in which she was being abused. She knew it wasn't the best for her, but she stayed and she died that way, but she learned love (due to her having a child). She agreed that the life was tough, but that she learned things as well.

It's a tough call for me to make, on whether or not someone isn't or is suppose to be doing or be in a specific place at a particular time, simply because I can't deem it as being the truth by universal standards.

If  I got with the argument that everything in the world is as it should be, then there is no SHOULDN'T. But if I live in the world and say that everything is a contradiction of itself, and that what I CAN fix is also what I CAN'T fix, then it seems like an endless loop of me fixing one wrong, but many other of the same wrongs existing at the same time in different locations.

I literally thought to myself that if I said to that man "you should stop this" where would that lead the dozens of others like him? And then I started to realize I was thinking to much and that I may have missed an opportunity to help that man out. Or maybe I did help him by just listening and not telling him what he SHOULD be doing like so many other people would naturally be inclined to do.

The issue is more, perhaps, that I don't understand addictions. I've never had to deal with it, and so from the outside looking in at someone who is an addict, and hearing people say that what they're doing is bad, it's easy to follow the herd, but it's another thing to listen to them before they truly lose themselves.

Actually, perhaps this can be said about quite a lot of things in life. Being Asian, and not understanding the lifestyle of an American...but they can say it's due to culture, but despite this culture, there are still things that make us human and there are things we can relate to. Such as being angry, or sad or happy. It happens to us all.

The part of me that says that I should've told him to get up and go make something of himself, didn't care to hear how he may have ended up where he is now in the first place. That his addiction is similar to an obese person's addiction with food. Or another person's addiction to pleasure, such as binge watching t.v. or playing video games. These can affect us more than we care to admit, by taking us away from possible lives we could be living, but aren't. So how far off are we from this man I met this morning?

Everything, somehow, is confusing, when I break it down. It seems to come back full circle sometimes. It leaves me wondering if a person can even be a saint. Would anyone even believe this person? I mean look at what happened to Jesus. There could be other people like Jesus living on earth today, but people certainly wouldn't think so. They'd call this person a fake. It's not their idea of what it SHOULD  be like.

And perhaps some people don't get this deep in thought as I do, or even care haha I remember, growing up and my mom always saying "everyone else is in the box, but you're the only one outside of it." This only happens sometimes....or maybe it's just so normal for me I think it's sometimes. I'm not overthinking, I don't know if it's a such thing as overthinking. Simply put, I like to understand and the best way to understand something is to approach it from many different angles.

What may seem like a triangle from one angle COULD just be a triangle. And some people would just accept it for what it is and move on with their lives. But when you take that journey around the object, you start to realize that it's not just a triangle, but a pyramid, or even a different shape altogether.

I can understand that some people may not find enjoyment in thinking so far into things, but I do. It would be nice to just have a discussion with people who might do the same, but I'm cool with being alone with my thoughts. Plus it's funny to say things to people sometimes and for them to be confused by what I said.

I will say that don't think thinking this way make me smart or anything, or a deep person or any of that. I just feel like myself and nothing more. I don't know if I'm trying to make statement, but I do know that I'd like to understand myself in relation to things as best as I can. I don't know if I'll ever make a choice that I feel is the BEST choice, and that does worry me considering the idea that I don't know if there is a best choice. My feelings are often conflicted, which caused a lot of indecisiveness in my past, but it's because I see a multitude of possibilities steaming from one choice to the next.

It's like having an opportunity appearing right before your face with multiple branching paths. Some seem better  than others, but there are too many to choose from. Someone might say "follow your gut feeling" but honestly, what if I am? Geez, mind and intuition don't match very well hahaha

Well, I'm done. My food is cold now! On that note, I'm going to eat. What do you make of this? You can say I've over-complicated such a simple matter, but let's complicate it for the sake of a discussion. To get a deeper understanding of our own thought process in relation to the outside world that we're a part of.

Mon