Good Times, Good Times....

Why is life so complicated? Things go so much more smoothly when I just do my school work and forget about everything else. I'm just going to pretend that people don't exist for awhile, except for my teachers and the folks in my classes, of course. But even them, I'll just have to view them as abstractions, like characters on a T.V. show, and my responses to them will have to be, like, thinking out loud, to myself. I will not let the fact that the T.V. characters are responding to what I'm saying phase me...it's just a conincidence, is what I'll tell myself. They aren't real, they're only acting like they're real. They're actors, they're clever like that.

Wah. I have lots of work to do, but I'm not going to do it. When I'm doing my work, I feel dreadfully lonely. When I'm hanging out with folks, I worry incessently (Incessently! Incessently!) about all the work I'm not getting done. When will my life be full of pleasure? When will the pain go away?

Today I was reading Silas Marner by George Eliot, and she was like...how did it go...this is a paraphrase...something about how this guy, whose wife is infertile, would spend his middle age regretting not having kids, feeling like that was the one thing keeping him from thourougly enjoying his life, because he, like all of us, are under the mistaken impression that it's somehow possible to ever thouroughly enjoy life. I agree with Ms. Eliot. Thouroughly enjoying life is impossible. It doesn't happen. Not to say that life isn't fun, it's just never pure fun, untainted. The spectre of death is always looming in the background : )

I dreamed last night: I went to the rainforests of China for six months, and then I was going to France for six months. It was nice to feel as though things were changing, that I was stepping outside of my comfort zone, and doing new things. Actually, that's how I feel about the classes I'm taking this quarter. I'm taking an Honors course, which is quite outside of my comfort zone, and I'm taking a class on Science Fiction. What is so "out-of-the-box" about it is the fact that I didn't ask the I Ching's permission (an old chinese method of divination) to take them, like I usually do. I'm sick of the boring harmony and happiness that the I Ching offers me. I want something that's gonna push me to do something greater than I'm really capable of. I want to break free from myself, and really learn something new. Fuck the I Ching.

A couple of months from now, when my life has gone completely down the drain, and I'm living in a cardboard box somewhere in Mexico, I'll repent of my actions, and start consulting the I Ching again. But for now I'm just gonna "wing it."