a writer

            Son, when you grow up, you can be anything you want.

            Anything?           

            Well, of course. Any kind of doctor.   

            Your parents didn't tell you to study hard and become a doctor because they wanted you to take care of them when they grow old. They wanted you to become a doctor because it would mean security and stability.

            Screw stability, you said. I love writing.

            And perhaps you'll be successful as a writer. Perhaps you won't be – success is subjective, anyhow. So long as you're happy and doing what you love, you convince yourself that it's worth it. You put up with the dingy apartment, and you learn to cope with sleep deprivation. You find ways to postpone paying the rent, and you take all the odd jobs you can fit.

            True, you may very well be the happiest person alive. But it can be hard for the people around you to understand that.

            I just want to be happy, Dad.

**

            "So I take it you want to be a writer. Well, what are you interested in?"

            "I like writing fiction," he responded.

            "I see." He paused.

            "Good luck."        

**

Do

"What makes you do the things you do? Why do you do what you do?"

Mom: I want to make the most of my time here.
Biology professor: Sex.
Lydia: So that one day I can do what I want to do.
Leon: Because I want to, damn it. This shouldn't even be a question.
Me: I don't know. I just want to be happy.

I should try asking more people this question.

the gray

i suppose there is nothing wrong with uncertainty
unfortunately supposing and believing are not the same.
"you only see things in black and white," i've been told
"you can't always expect an answer."
as if i do so because im blind to gray

i probably am blind though, in a way
but not because the rods and cones of my brain
cannot process the duller shades.
i detest mulling for too long in the gray
because im not strong enough to stay.

i changed my mind on the matter at least five times, i realize.
"yes" became "maybe" became "definitely" became "please" became "sigh."
so in that sense, i am no better than you
you who went to lunch twice to avoid a trivial confrontation
you who was so mind-numbingly sure of being unsure.

were i not already so entrenched in gray
i wouldn't have cared whether you were as well.
so perhaps that is what you desire
not a fellow man tracing circles in the dark without any conviction
but a blind man who is boneheaded enough to keep sprinting forward.

i tried to play the part, you know
i pulled out the list of action verbs and the present tense
let's do this, let's do that, do you want to.
but the verbs, while outwardly full of action
were stillborn by our mutual passivity.

that man isn't me.
me is the little boy who worries about irrelevant matters to the point of giving up
me is the newspaper boy who forcibly finds amusement in the obsolescence of his job
me is the foolish boy who interprets everything too much and too dramatically
me is the loving boy who plays with the concerns of adults without comprehending them.

so yes, i lied when i said i was confident things would work out.
i don't believe in myself or you enough to say that
because when two are trapped in the gray
moving aimlessly and cautiously
even the longest of time may not bring them to black and white.

who am i to you, i wondered
"a friend, but not romantically"
or that shoulder and arm you clung to for hours on end?
and so it was that i then decided to offer you the pureness of white
only to have it returned  another dull shade of uncertainty.
 
it's disheartening to have lost something that might have been dear to me
a friendship flirting with the chance of something more
though i guess now we'll never know.
who am i to you, i couldn't summon the courage to ask
a question i possibly never will.

yet even with all this uncertainty and ambiguity
perhaps this is the saddest part of all.
since that time what now seems so long ago
i've stopped caring about the question of who am i to you
not because i no longer wish for one or the other
or because i have already forgotten how.
no, i've given up thinking about that question
because i've realized that i already know your answer.

"I don't know."

TFZ

My computer science homework for this week: TFZ.

Love and death

I suppose it's not a particularly new idea that love and death are connected -- we see this in the phrase "til death do us part," the hilariously melodramatic Romeo and Juliet, the ending line of "What Sarah Said" by Deathcab for Cutie, and countless other pieces of culture that I am too ignorant to think of at the moment.

Evidently, there's something about the concept of love that leads us to believe that it ought to last an entire lifetime -- that is, until death.

I guess that's what scares me the most. Not the loving itself, but the unwritten lifetime contract associated with it.

You can break the contract, sure; some people even go so far as to expect it of others. But the issue is that the contract isn't just about you -- there's another person involved too. And I don't know if I can entrust myself with that much responsibility.

Of course, it's also just as likely that you are that "other person."

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My sister once pointed out to me that in French, love and death sound essentially the same: l'amour and la mort.

It might just be a coincidence.

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Operating under the assumption that couples fall in love before their 30s, choosing your significant other is something that will potentially affect 2/3 of your entire life -- a decision that took maybe a tenth of your life to make.

That worries me.

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The frightening part about death is that it's inevitable; the frightening part about love is that nothing is.

Somehow, the latter seems worse.

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I don't actually know where I'm going with this, "this" meaning a variety of things.

But I'm patient.
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Worries

"To philosophize is to learn how to die. That is because study and contemplation draw our souls somewhat outside ourselves, keeping them occupied away from the body, a state which both resembles death and which forms a kind of apprenticeship for it; or perhaps it is because all of the wisdom and argument in the world eventually comes down to one conclusion, which is to teach us to not be afraid of dying."

-Michel de Montaigne

For a while, I'd fixated myself on the problem of "What's the point of living if we're all going to die?" I had tried and failed to make sense of it, so naturally, I quickly took Camus's argument to heart (see Suicide). Life is meaningless, and that's okay.

Last night though, in a typical state of 2 AM semi-consciousness, I realized that I've been asking the wrong question the whole time. Because that first question isn't really a question at all, or at least a useful one. What's the point of life? There isn't a point. Simple as that. You either learn to accept it and move on, or you continue to wallow in your existentialist crises. 

I think the better question is this: "We're all going to die, so what's the point of worrying?"

Because why concern yourself with something that's coming anyway? It's not as if all the praying and prostrating and screaming and philosophizing in the world will stop you from dying. You might as well just stick your head in your shell and embrace the present (see Head out of shell).

The obvious answer is that we're afraid of death. We're afraid of what we cannot control. But why?  Why is it so hard to cast aside questions of purpose, of existence, of death, when we know that these questions are irresolvable? What good does it do to worry about what we cannot change?

As it turns out, quite a lot.

Granted, philosophizing about life's problems won't lead you to the answers -- those answers just don't exist. Just like how a turtle staring at the horizon will have no bearing on whether the ship arrives or not, there's nothing you can say or believe that will answer these things for sure.

But it's not all to waste, because in the process of asking all of these questions, something very interesting happens: you realize that none of them really matter.

I think this concept is ultimately what Montaigne and Driving with Plato were trying to get at. Not the interesting little details about how our lives are a timeline of check boxes and landmarks with a smattering of internal crises, but instead that the sole purpose of all this philosophizing is to accept the fact that it's useless.

Which, paradoxically, makes it anything but.

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."

 
My answer to that question, then, is that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether life is or is not worth living, because there isn't actually an answer. And all the philosophizing in the world can't do a single thing to change that.

I think that's a beautiful thing.

Delusional

Probably because it's a straightforward conversation piece, pretty much everyone I saw this break asked me "How is college?"

I usually gave the same answer, though of course with some variation: "I'm really happy there, I like it a lot (feigned exclamation point)."

It's actually a question I asked myself a few times during the semester -- a preoccupation with the question of happiness stuck with me from high school -- and each time, I'd told myself that I was happy. Then when other people asked me, I would again say yes, I was happy.

The thing is, I didn't actually believe what I was saying at first. But eventually I did.

I wonder: maybe happiness is merely a form of self-delusion. After all, if you're deluding yourself effectively enough, it's not as if you would be able to tell the difference.