Futility

Apparently, blogging more frequently was not one of my New Year's Resolutions. And if it was, I failed rather spectacularly. Not that I haven't been thinking about blogging, or wanting to blog, but things seem to continually get in the way. Like school. I think my schedule's on about the fourth of fifth go around. I thought I had it all worked out before Christmas break. But then come to find out the first day of school that the world has just exploded and I'm scrambling to catch the next flight to Alpha Centauri. I went to three or four classes that I will never again attend. But I think I finally have a schedule. I also may not live very long.

So for my creative nonfiction class I had to write this 500 word essay type thing on one of the "thought provoking" quotes the teacher gave us. Basically you just take an idea and explore it and maybe relate it to your life or something. It seemed kind of similar to a blog, so I'd planned to kill two birds with one stone and write something to post on here as well as turn in to class (I figure Blogger's not a huge stickler for self-plagarism). I've now written two different essays, neither one of which is actually in the requested style. However, I did write a nice bit about dead. Or more specifically, Dead, the capital D implying the kind of dead you read about in fictional accounts of lively animated corpses.

I've remembered why I stopped doing homework last semester. It's the maddening futility of it all. I've been working steadily at my homework all week, putting off reading, movies, and the oh so tempting 3 seasons of Scrubs sitting at my fingertips, and yet no sooner do I finish my assignments for one day then I crash into bed and lose myself in sleep, only to wake too soon and drag myself to class to begin again. I've concluded that it isn't actually possible to get ahead on homework. It's much easier to just stop doing it entirely.

Being tired and trying to go to bed at night is a bit of a cruel irony. You're exhausted, so you want to hurry and get to bed, but you're so tired you're moving really slowly, which means it takes you even longer to get to bed, and you just get more and more tired. It's one of those vicious cycles. Eating junk food is the same way. You eat something overly salty, so then you have to eat something sugary, and then you feel gross, so you drink some orange juice, but in opening the fridge you saw the leftover cheescake, and pretty soon you've eaten twice as much food as you meant to and you can't even enjoy it because you feel entirely disgusting. Socializing, or the lack thereof, does the same thing. You don't go to the party, because you won't know anyone there, and you can't know anyone because you didn't go out. It's impossible situations like this that seem to make life more difficult than it ought to be. But honestly, who's to say how difficult life ought or ought not to be? We seem to each pick our own arbitrary point to draw the line and say, this is how life ought to be, and this is too far. Yet for each generation there seems to be a trend to shift the standards up. Kids strike out on their own and want to live at the same level as their parents, but they forget that their parents have been working 20 years to get to that point. And we've certainly come a long way from the lentil-a-day philosophy of Buddha.

Sometimes I write things for this blog that I don't include. I just decide that the thought was silly, fleeting, or inconsequential. I didn't have enough to say on the subject, perhaps, or I felt I was being petty. Perhaps this itself is a silly thought. After all, no thoughts are inconsequential, and there's no such thing as a stupid question. (This is an example of sarcasm, because I can and do label questions as stupid on an almost daily basis while attending class. I'm not being mean, people just need to learn to use their brains rather than expecting to have the world handed to them on a silver platter in neat, pre-digested form. Or perhaps some of them will actually learn to listen the first time it's spelled out for them). The idea is that you should never downplay a potential idea, because that stunts creativity. If you're brainstorming in a group, you take great care not to squash anyone's brain child, because then they get all nervous about what you might say next time and hold back a potentially genius remark. Or if not genius in itself, the remark that would have sparked an idea in their neighbor that would in fact have cured world hunger.

I need new music. I actually just skipped 10 songs in a row on my favorite playlist because I'm getting tired of always listening to the same things. I think the problem is that I don't listen to radio, so I don't often get exposed to new music. I just can't stand listening to the people talk, so I'm constantly switching channels. This has the dual problem of causing me to miss the title and artist, and also tends to make me drift wildly across the road while driving. Don't worry, I've never actually hit anything. I'm a smart reckless driver; I regularly break the law but never in a dangerous manner. Sort of like jaywalking when there's no cars around. Or stealing someone's french fries when they were just going to throw them away anyway. But yeah, music is good. I have a lot of it. I listen to a fraction on a regular basis. I've thought about thinning my library, but what if one day I wanted one of those songs, only to find I'd deleted it? Yes, I hoard things, and no, I'm not ashamed of myself. Okay, maybe a little bit.