in libris libertas...

It’s always too easy to come up with the textbook solutions and answers to everything. All life resembles but the simplest plot and everything should just be as easy as doing what you know or conjectured would be right in any given situation. But, sad to say, we have the misfortune of actually striving day by day to live life rather than just theorize and stare at the endless possibilities of how to act or what to say… things happen, and in the most common stories we find ourselves thinking ‘if I were there, this is what I would do… if I was the one to go through at most anything else, I would have been better or faster or less inclined to the human weakness of error.

I’ve always wished life to be different, as easy to predict as the usual storylines and as hard to take me by surprise and at a loss for what to say or what to do. But it never is. Looking back, you chastise yourself I should have known or I should have done this, I shouldn’t have been as weak, as easy to show emotion and defeat. Yet at any given moment you couldn’t really care what the heck you do or how you act or what to say. At the news of death of a parent or a friend in all novels I’ve devoured through the years I always find funny the dramatic explosions of sorrow or smirk at the description of unconscious tears streaming down grave faces. Yes, I feel saddened for the character’s sakes and I feel for the loss, the grief… but it all seems too cooked up to stir feelings and all the elaborate declamations of woe seems too contrived. Then you encounter it for real and all humor flies out the window. You sit uncaring as your tears fall without you realizing you are crying. There is that internal struggle as you come to grips with something that mind blowing that you don’t readily feel the sadness and grief and all that cursed emptiness. Everything comes to mind at the same time nothing does. Everything is blank. Every action though uncommon is almost involuntary. All you’ve read about it seems correct in every way yet lacking.

A life examined is a life lived

Lately, I’ve been too busy in preoccupying myself with mere trifles just to pass time and justify day after day. I feel like I’m just covering up a stupendously empty existence. Nothing matters. Everything else is more important than that shiftlessness I can’t shake off. Countless of times I ask myself to what purpose am I here for only to stare blankly into space and fall back into the indifferent comfort of routine. I remember JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye as I think I now understand the emptiness and worthlessness Holden felt as he drifted from nowhere to nowhere in vain hope of anything to give him/his life any semblance of meaning.

Is this but another passing phase? Is this a turning point in the pathetic novel that is my life? Or is this the final struggle I must endure in the unbearable uncertainty and confusion that is adolescence? Must I now prepare myself to finally grow up? A friend remarks that I have a propensity to questions. Can I help it if it seems that my entire life is?

If I were to treat my life as a story, where would it go? What would be the logical next step? What would prove to be most satisfactory? Unfortunately, I’m crap at writing stories. If I have just read my life I would be chastising myself as to being unsatisfied when there is nothing else I could probably need or want that I can’t strive for. Nothing else perhaps but peace of mind…

Do you know the story Flowers for Algernon? (There is a movie version for the less inclined to search and read) It is about Charlie, a retard, an adult with a kid’s brain capacity. All his life he wanted to be smart then he got his wish and realized how extremely complicated the world became and how hard it is to be as happy as he was when he was stupid and made fun of. No, I do not think I am intelligent enough to bear the loneliness and frustration of genius. But sometimes I wish I have never cared about all this. I wish I could just lose myself in something I could consider noble enough to strive for and live for.

Have I ever said I really hate life?