Clarity
Last night I had an epiphany after a long, long drought of not having any. You know how our pal, Soren, discusses despair — there’s despair of a person who knows not he is in despair and then there’s despair of a person who knows he is in despair, further categorized into those who think they can control everything in their lives and those who think they have no control at all. The safest manner to be in despair, I think, is to stay in the middle. Yes, our other pal Gautama had it right all along…the key is moderation.
I will not belabor the fact that we have all been rejected or brushed aside at some point in our lives. This is not a unique phenomenon, and in this regard Tyler of Fight Club is right in saying, I am not a unique snowflake. It is all that the human condition is about, to suffer and learn. But it still pisses me off. The truth will set you free but first it will piss you off.
There are some things you can control, some things you can’t, and that time of the month will not help you any. Sometimes it’s hormonal, most of the time it’s existential and the key is, I think, to ride the wave. It’s somewhere between brazen knowledge and quiet consternation, just there, right between clutching power and control (at least of your own life) to your chest and wildly abandoning everything, throwing caution to the wind. Last night I learned to let go. Bahala na.
My friend, the Fuzzy, in one of our more significant conversations, told me that if you really think about it, 95% of what you worry about is not really your problem. It’s you parents’ problem, it’s your friends’ problem, it’s your school’s problem, not really entirely yours. And this morning I woke up with a renewed sense of selfishness. It should be me first, in all things, ME first. Forget that you can’t please everyone (to the guy in class who always comes across as a doofus for saying the wrong things in attempts to assuage I don’t know what), forget that you can’t make people love you (to It who’s officially not part of my life), forget even that everything will roll down from the white hills of beauty and kindness, to embrace you with open arms and pave the way to a bright, blindingly spectacular future (to the guy who, almost 4 decades later still thinks the world owes him favors), it all boils down to YOU. To ME.
So what’s the battle plan now. Me. Me. Me. Yahoo!
July 9th, 2005 at 8:47 am
smell, your whole existence is spent existentializing. what an epiphany! about the “me” part, things won’t really change when you still think of yourself in relation to others— how I feel about this, how I think that what you’re doing is wrong, how I want to do things my way instead of yours. Rand’s selfishness is not all that it’s hyped up to be. When you concentrate only on yourself, you lose sight of the bigger picture. And like that guy who still thinks that the world owes him favors, you too will start thinking that nothing else matters except yourself. Look at what’s happening to some members of our law posse. You DO have a strong point though. Sometimes I just want to stop giving a rat’s ass about anything.
So i guess I have a concurring and dissenting opinion. I concur with what you said about riding the wave. And maybe sometimes we have to take a step back and mind our own business. There are a lot of important things to concern ourselves with in this world. It’d be such a pity if we spend hours on end concentrating on petty stuff.
As for your brilliantly written blog, I must say that the smelly never ceases to amaze or at least entertain me.
July 10th, 2005 at 6:52 pm
Aww…smelly+fuzzy= LOVE.