Things to do

Before, I saw life as a series of prescriptively necessary steps. But now I see--You are given all this time, and all you want to do is find some way to fill it up with things to do.

The hallmark of adulthood

It may be difficult for an honest or naive person to understand, that the hallmark of the game of adulthood is impression-making,  the movement from outright sincerity toward impression-making. 

Lately, I've been understanding more and more the role of impression, or perceived-value, to human minds. It is replicated between two individuals just as it is among nations. It is as though the world runs on it. 

To get what you want, you try to create impressions in the minds of others. These invisible things guide what happens.  This is often difficult to understand. After all, why would one not display what one wants with honesty? Well, it seems the hallmark of adulthood is in learning to not show it. 

One of the rules you learn first the hard way about adulthood is this: never beg. To all unfavorable conclusions, respond "so be it" and proceed with your life. It is only after having replied thus that you will learn of the true intention of the impression the owner of these words wanted to create about themself in your mind. 

A nod to Beckett

What do you think about in those moments, when you are unwell? What goes through your mind? Usually, just songs.

And how is it that you still make plans when it lets you go for a second? It is because you know that there is never a perfect solution. Something wins, and you go on. 

vignette

Your life is a meaningless series of vignettes, fluctuations in it caused only by national holidays and the weather.

The morning that you will feel better.

When something causes one to suffer, there is usually one thing one dreams about: the morning they will wake up and everything will be better. 

But there will be no such morning.

When you will get better, you will not notice it. It will be a blurry transition such that, one day, when peeling potatoes or gazing into nothingness, you will ask yourself, "Did I once feel so bad?", and some vague shudder will resonate through your torso. But you will not remember when or how you got better, when it was that your suffering dissipated. There will not come an instant when you leap out of bed and cry out, "finally, finally, my life has begun!".

It is as with everything else: there are no happy endings in life--only optimization. 

"Faith" is what there is when there is no hope.

One only misses being a denizen of reality once that becomes an abstract dream, and that is a problem. You fantasize about it now the way a prepubescent girl does about her prince. Your fantasy is to enjoy twiddling your thumbs on a bus again, to count bathroom tiles, even to visit the post office to discharge a meaningless errand. It is only from the vantage point of what could happen that you manage to do your living, and from this vantage point you claim that you value your life. The luror of what could happen spurs you to go on, while the meat of your life passes you by. So, can it rightly be said that such a person values their life?

You can understand religion now; "faith" is what there is when there is no hope. 

the normalization of happiness

Who knew that lame trips to the convenience store through a rainy, polluted street and the ensuing perusal of unacceptably manufactured products in colorful isles under bright lights to the tune of middle-class shmaltz could be so agonizingly missed-- the way I used to sing, out of boredom, on the way there and chew gum. But that was life! That is all it ever really is. 

Normative notions are sometimes true, the way that anyone's face perks up in attention to the common language of "I am happy/but I am not happy", and really, it is probably the only thing which could be universally understood.  

One step removed

The truth is, one only writes when well enough, by which time, the original problem sheds its relevance. To understand is, quite literally, to feel the same. And when things like art and beauty have meaning and inspire, one is just happy enough to write and cannot really correctly remember what it was like to have your will crushed before you or to wonder how many disconfirmations of the natural proclivity to rationalize in the direction of hope it takes to pulverize that proclivity. And so, one will never accurately recreate those fears and sensations.