Platitudes and idioms

"Good morning" presupposes the notion that the morning can ever be good.

Asking me how I'm doing is like asking Wilford Brimley how his diabetes is coming along.

To suggest that one "go with the flow" is to suggest that the flow is entirely safe from beginning to end. How many movies have you seen, though, where a river leads to a cliff and a waterfall, with nothing but jagged rocks and carnivorous fish at the bottom? Exactly.

Even if the grass were greener on the other side, that could easily be faked. I mean, what if the other guy's grass was just green plastic? Who wants that?

I won't get into the logistical problems behind "a penny saved is a penny earned," save for the practical reality that a penny is worth less than the copper-plated zinc it's made of.

Fuck.

I wrote this without thinking!

I'm going to bed before sunrise tonight. I took a very long nap earlier today, which resulted in me eating a very late dinner (try 8 PM.)

I still kind of hate myself. Every time I think about something, anything about me, I get this feeling in my stomach that's just awful.

I'm just posting because I felt like I should get my post count up and that I should probably write a little bit each day, whether it's on one of my (three) blogs or it's something else. People have told me that I'm a very good writer--I say I'm a very bad writer who's been very lucky with those who have read his writing.

I love The Who. I'm just starting to get back into them after a few years of dismissing them, alternately for being either too iconic (i.e. "My Generation" and "Magic Bus" have become cliches of rock music) or for being too pretentious (for Tommy and Quadrophenia.) What I've come to realize is that they are the kind of band who can perform a song about anything and can put their all into it, and be as sincere as possible about how they relate to the music. They're one of the most powerful bands ever, and I very intensely envy Pete Townshend for his enormous talent (and for being a member of The Who.) I try to play guitar, and I've gotten pretty decent since I was fifteen, but I'm not good enough to be in a band, not good enough to play in public and not good enough to really call myself a guitarist. Maybe I could be in a punk band, where expectations of the performers as musicians are actually minimal--but then I'd need at least a few hundred for a decent amplifier. Maybe I'm just judging myself too harshly and I'm actually a pretty good guitar player. But then I hear someone great, and...

I wish I didn't have to be in college. I wish I could live out the rock and roll fantasy that I've had in my head for years--I wish I could be the guy on stage right, playing long, self-indulgent guitar solos during awesome hard rock songs about unkind women or the struggles of being a young man in an old man's world. If I were a performing musician I'd probably play a Fender Jazzmaster. I'd sand it down, lacquer it clear and show off the wood. I'd be the only guitarist in the band--I'd be legendary, and I wouldn't be overshadowed by some talent-deprived schmuck with nothing to do but double my parts. I could have an excuse to be a complete asshole.

But that's not who I am and that's never going to happen. It's just a dream that won't come true. I'm starting to think I really ought to just stop dreaming altogether. The realization that one's dreams are too unrealistic to ever happen in real life is often too painful to bear, and I've endured it far too often.

It's amazing, what insanity will make of a man...

It's been another depressed, morose, sleepless night. Talking Heads plays, quietly, from my laptop speakers--"Burning Down the House" ends with this sentence. My vision is blurred, my eyes are bleary, I have indigestion--I don't care. I can't go to sleep. If I went to bed now, I would sleep through my commitments. I am, however, insane, and this is entirely clear to me after tonight's events. Sad, but true.

To be insane means to not be sane. There is some deficiency or defect in my mind which causes me to be depressed, which causes me to be an insomniac, which causes me to hate myself at times. Insanity of some sort is undoubtedly the root of my eccentricities and self-destructive behavior. Of course, the "sane" mind is hard to come by in general, but not all insanity is the same. Some of it is alluring, exotic, sexy--alcoholism, for instance, or an oral fixation. Insomnia and depression are far from sexy. Insomnia and depression are pathetic and repulsive--no girl wants a man who seldom sleeps through the night, and spends most of their time unhappy and unmotivated, incapable of feeling pleasure or recognizing that which is good in their lives. Perhaps sanity is more a state than a quality; perhaps sanity and insanity come and go, or change with the seasons. Perhaps the sane mind is an Essentialist concept, an idealized, hypothetical form which exists nowhere in reality, and all we know is insanity. Perhaps the sane are merely those who acknowledge their own eccentricities. At any rate, though, there is much that is not quite right about me.

It's six in the morning now, and I'm writing for a blog that nobody reads. Perhaps I will find a follower or two at some point if I keep promoting it heavily enough.

Anyway...on to my wild night. I watched three films tonight: Annie Hall (which was amazing,) Cool Hand Luke (which was amazing,) and Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic (which was distinctly mediocre.) I did this in the early morning, as opposed to sleep. Naturally, the self-loathing thoughts went on in the background the entire time--that's where I'm at these days. Believe me when I insist that I didn't ask to be this way. Basically, while I watched Annie Hall, all I could think was that I was disappointed in myself for not being as smart as Woody Allen. During Cool Hand Luke, I very seriously considered trying to match Luke's egg-eating feat--then the self-loathing set in again, because I'm not as handsome or charismatic as Paul Newman, and while I may be a nonconformist like Luke Jackson was, I'm not the same in any way. My brand of nonconformity is not the sexy Hollywood nonconformity of Luke Jackson, it's the kind of chubby, awkward "confound-even-the-hipsters" nonconformity that captivates nobody. I got to thinking about my male role models--my dad first and foremost, followed by the likes of Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, and so on--and realized that I have turned out unlike any of them, and I'm also somewhat ashamed of that fact. It's silly, perhaps, but it affects me deeply. As to the third film: I got depressed here too, because Sarah Silverman is a very attractive young woman, and I know I will never be in a romantic relationship with a woman like that. Chances are I will never be in a relationship with a woman, period--I'm not attractive enough, not smart enough, not charming enough, I have too many weird hang-ups, I'm a little pretentious, I deliberate too much and act too little, I can't relate to many people on many issues, and ultimately I'm simply an unsuitable mate. It's a shame, but at least I'm not stringing some poor young lady along, constantly disappointing her when she could be with a much better man. At least I am alone, and not inconveniencing some poor sweet girl who took pity on a loser such as myself. I know, I had to reach a little to reach that from Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic, but it's a subject which has been on my mind a lot lately, and it bothers me.

After I watched these pieces, I listened to music for a few minutes, played Sudoku, and did some more introspective reflection. I didn't solve any of my problems, but only really made myself even more aware of my failings--hell, I even feel bad for something as silly as having never read anything by D.H. Lawrence. I'm reaching a point where all of my faults, no matter how small they are, are magnified very intensely by my ego, to the point where I've started to develop psychoses out of practically everything. Of course, I feel uncomfortable in the social world, and so I feel like I don't even have peers to reassure me that my existence is worthwhile. Even those who would call themselves my friends could do just fine without me--I occupy very little of their time, and my actions are of such little consequence to them. There are few who know me whose lives would be impacted negatively if they were to never see me again. That's where I stand. In school, and in the workplace (back when I did work,) I'm less of a person than I am an occupational hazard--I'm essentially just that one extremely uncomfortable thing that everyone has to deal with occasionally. In an environment where physical contact is particularly common, I am the sole individual who cannot touch another--my very touch is unsettling, as far as I can tell.

Basically, I'm very depressed. I'm overweight, I lack charisma, I'm socially retarded, I'm less intelligent and less motivated than my peers, I have serious self-image problems, and I feel incredibly lonely. What I want in my life is a girl who I can hold myself against without feeling awkward about it, one who will accept my flaws for what they are, and one who I do not feel the need to constantly apologize to. I want a discipline or area of interest or expertise that I can devote my life to--and I want it to be one which I will feel happy with constantly and consistently, I want it to be one which I will not be embarrassed by, and I want it to be one I'm capable of doing, in addition to loving it. I also want to take on a regular sleep schedule again. It may happen soon.

As humans, we all want things. It's just that I've reached a point where my wants, in addition to other factors, has caused me to be miserable essentially all the time. Even when I smile or laugh or give off the appearance of happiness, there is always a subtext of misery.

Principles of Accounting

My school requires its students to take something called a First Year Seminar. It's a seminar-style course that's taken during the first year. It is on one of a variety of subjects, ranging from baseball, to acting, to fine-tuning one's bullshit-meter, to accounting. The latter, unfortunately, is the one that I'm taking.

I say unfortunately not out of hatred or contempt for accountants or for the accounting discipline itself. I say it because I feel that I have been dealt misfortune by being enrolled in an accounting course. It is, of course, of my own doing--at one time I thought it might be interesting, and if not interesting at least useful. What has come from it has been nothing but stress, worry, intense feelings of intellectual inadequacy, and even more intense feelings of regret. It is not necessarily productive to worry, but the soul needs worry, if only to be able to recognize that something in one's life is doing harm to them. There are concepts in the discipline of accounting which I am not willing to care about at this point in my life, in spite of the fact that this is the time for me to care about the concepts, as they are relevant to me right now. But they will never be relevant again, and although this is a despicable practice, I am already acting as if they are not presently relevant--after all, are they really? Insofar as I am in a class on the subject, yes, but in my life separate from this course, out in the real world, the accounting discipline holds no importance in my life as it stands now.

I will not lie and say I never enjoyed it. At the start, I really did like the practice of accounting, back when it involved the simple duties of filling out balance sheets, preparing income statements and attending class four times a week. Soon, however, the complexity and the tedium were increased exhaustively, and it soon became apparent to me that, at some point, I no longer had the desire or will to take accounting seriously, and I realized that I was not the type of person who becomes an accountant. It requires the type of precision that comes from a high tolerance for tedium--and I hardly tolerate tedium. I can't say for sure what it is I am interested in--I could make some guesses, but they would be inconclusive and subject to change--but I can say for certain that I have no interest in the discipline of accounting. There's no shame, I suppose, in not being an accountant, just as there's no shame in not being anything else, and after all one person can only be so many things. I admit that I'm slightly ashamed at simply being apparently incapable, or at the very least unwilling, to perform towards a duty which had specifically been prescribed to me (that is, fulfilling the requirements of the accounting course itself, which I have performed remarkably poorly in,) and this fact, more than the fact that I do not enjoy accounting, is what provides me with such discomfort and upset. It is that I have been so poor in fulfilling my duties (both in this and, to an extent, in all of my other courses--but more on that another time) that puts me at unease.

I hate to be a failure, and I hate to have the grounds to call myself a failure. But what, in fact, are the grounds for failure? Is failure really the inability to be exceptional? Well, one can be exceptional, and that is certainly a resounding success, but it would be a logical fallacy to state that the opposite of being exceptional is being a failure. No, failure is simply what it is--the opposite of success. I suppose, then, that one could define success under personal, subjective parameters, and by that same token define failure similarly, but that to me is a cop-out. That makes it too easy to deem every failure a success, and to ignore the practical realities of failure. Failure, I suppose, is what you call it when your goals have not been met. That works well to an extent, because it makes failure a state of being as opposed to a value judgment--it allows for one to have tried as hard as they could and still have failed, and it makes it so that failure is tolerable, even forgivable. But is the aim to make failure tolerable or forgivable? Or is failure something which should not be tolerable or forgivable--a sort of mark on one's conscience that is there to haunt and remind of that which went wrong. Perhaps what failure really is, then, is what happens when one does not perform to the best of their abilities. This is troubling in that it is practically irreconcilable with that which is out of the operator's control--"acts of god" as it were, or things which make it hard to perform at one's best--because, if one performs at their best in the face of adversity and they end up failing anyway, then the definition falls apart. For instance, one could fail, in an objective sense, by losing in a game of catch, even if they were playing as well as they could, simply because they were, perhaps, blind, and could not see the ball they were catching. A ridiculous example, yes, but it does bring up an important part of the definition and it may point me towards my most complete one yet--it brings up the idea that, perhaps, failure occurs on more than one level. I will say, then, that at its most basic and distilled essence, failure is an inability to live up to the standards of success in a given endeavor. This can be reconciled with the duality of purpose that I mentioned earlier, and with the circumstances beyond the operator's control which I likewise mentioned earlier. The former: one can obtain different outcomes based on different sets of standards. For instance, in one sense I may have failed at my accounting course in that I did not meet or approach my own standards, and at the same time I could succeed in my accounting course by not ending the course with a failing grade, i.e. by meeting the standards of success. Therefore, there can be personal failures and objective/practical failures, and the two are not mutually exclusive. The latter: circumstances beyond the operator's control can still result in an objective or practical success or failure, even if from a personal perspective the outcome is different. For instance, I could say that my chronic depression and insomnia have contributed to my personal failure in accounting, even if they did not change the objective success (or, perhaps, a term like un-failure would be more accurate, albeit nonexistent.) I can't, honestly, go any further with this definition. I am the sole interlocutor and have nobody to test my ideas against. Perhaps I ought to write a dialogue between myself and Socrates, testing the notions of failure and success (yuk yuk yuk.)

Anyway, I basically feel like a failure because I have performed under the standards at which I would like to have met or exceeded. This isn't so bad at all--ultimately, in a pragmatic sense, what matters isn't how I feel I did, but how I actually did--but what sticks with me is not whether or not I failed (and a C, even if it disappoints, is hardly a failure,) but whether or not I feel like I failed. This could mean that my standards for success are unrealistic and need redefinition--after all, can I really expect myself to complete and turn in every assignment perfectly, to understand each concept, to get an A on each test and quiz, and to be a productive member of the classroom environment, all while struggling to adapt to a new environment, dealing with the problems of long-term depression, struggling to both stay awake during the day and to sleep at night, struggling with feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt, and generally being maladjusted and disaffected? The A student is the exceptional student, but not the average, and not necessarily even the ideal. We can't all be "A students" all the time. I was in high school, I'm not right now, I may be later on in my life. I ought to be content with that, and in time I may be. No mistake is too large or too unbearable that it can't be remedied by careful and appealing rationalization. It may be an uncomfortable truth, but it is a truth nonetheless--we cope and move on my rationalizing and by accepting our failures and successes. It is better to live with a failure and to not allow it to hold your life back than it is to become consumed by failure and to allow it to ruin your life. No life deserves being ruined, and nobody's life can be ruined without their consent. Again, this all feels like rationalization, but it's a conclusion that I can see the value in. We must move on, even if we are aiming at nothing but contentment. I could question why we must move on, and I have, but that, I feel, is for another post.

I had homework for my accounting course. I struggled with it and didn't complete it--I began it, but have only incomplete work for both problems on the assignment. I felt awful when I finally gave up on it, but in retrospect I feel like it simply doesn't matter how poorly I did on that assignment. It is, perhaps, more important that I spent the early morning listening to jazz, reading Time magazine, and writing my mind out on my new blog. I love blogging--I love the idea of the blog, I love the antecedents to the blog, and I love the fact that it's so damn easy to do this shit.

Thought precedes expression (usually)

I had another blog up--I contaminated it with poorly-executed manifestations of various ideas, some of which I still find intriguing and some of which I balk at, wondering why I ever thought that these were interesting topics. But I was younger then, and very stupid, and I'm amazed at the fact that I feel like I've learned so much since then, but at the same time I can believe it. College has definitely changed me--it has made me more cognizant of my own flaws; it has given me a sleep disorder; it has shown me that some people will want to be your friend, and some will not want to be your friend, and regardless of what you do you cannot choose for them what they want to be to you; it has shown me that, sometimes, no matter how much you want to do something, you simply cannot bring yourself to do it, and that's simply the way it is; it has shown me that sometimes what is important as prescribed by others is not what is productive as needed by yourself; it has shown me that affection is easily misplaced, but the misplacement is not always your own fault; it has shown me that situations, attitudes, and opinions change with such rapidity that sometimes worrying is not worth the effort; it has shown me that good ideas are often easier in theory than in practice; it has shown me that too much thought and not enough expression can cause too much mental pressure.

That's what this blog is for--self-expression; a valve to let the steam out of the pipes.

This blog is not for juvenile humor that is funny only because it presents tropes which have been funny before. This blog is not for trite platitudes wrought by way of topical analyses. This blog is for me and what keeps me up at 5:41 in the morning, scraping away at life for some sort of glimmer of import or relevance. This blog is where I will solve my problems and offer my solutions up for peer review. This blog is where I will aim at clarity of thought, at salience of conclusion, and at beauty of process. Sometimes it will be Max Planck (slaving over a hot blackboard, aiming at something finite through something appropriately systematic), sometimes it will be Cannonball Adderley (creating statements both lucid and fanciful, through vague parameters of taste and theory.) It will not be Dean Koontz (whose work I never did care for) or 38 Special (whose radio-friendly brand of neutered Southern rock I will never come to appreciate,) but the comparisons are frivolous, and entirely unrelated to the point.

I may think of something and decide to write about it. It will go on the blog. I may lose the thought before I write it down--I may be disheartened by having forgotten it, but if I can't remember the thought then I'll lose nothing by not writing it down. I've forgotten more than I can remember forgetting (try sorting that one out) and what I've learned through my forgetfulness is only that not everything that has ever been learned or thought need be remembered at all times.

I have no format and no requirements, save that what I write is what interests me while I am writing it. If I were writing about something I didn't care about, then I would be lying to myself--and what is gained by lying to oneself? I've done it too much in the past and I know that good can rarely come of it.