damn, that's the length my paper is supposed to be. damn.
in reaction to forrest and john's notes to my entry a few entries back: no...you think? ha. no fucking shit. i ended up clocking in somewhere between 81 and 82 hours of being awake straight before I crashed and slepted for 20 hours or so. So now, at the moment, I'm worrying about failing all of my classes (or at least doing really badly in them) and losing my scholarship and fucking my GPA to hell, and so on and so on and so on. I'm also having a rather large existential crisis. You see, I was reading Locke, and then all of the sudden a line of thinking of mine led me to disprove all former beliefs of stuff--like our place in the universe, the relationship of our minds to matter or whatever, and so forth--and so now I'm just like...fuuuuuck. This is all so much bullshit. I mean, the structure of our "society"--bullshit. Totally. It's not built with people in mind at all. And it pisses me off. And in the past hour or so I much have had at least ten imagined dialogues with people (groups of people) of importance about this shit and I made the realize things they hadn't ever realized before and why shit sucks and so on and so forth. A lot of that was a result of me trying to think of what to tell my teachers and parents and so on. Goddamn it pisses me off how our lives are split up into so many different sections and each section is treated as independent from the others. How much bullshit is that? Where is the coherency? Since when have we stopped being...people? I don't know. how to say what I'm trying to say. But man, fuck it. I feel like pulling another high school and refusing to try. The difference this time is, I'm not stuck here. Goddamn this shit pisses me off. More than anything. Not being treated as a "person". I think that's basically, essentially it. This system/these systems do not treat us as people. They were not established and formed with people in mind. Certain aspects of people, maybe, but that's not enough. It's like saying having "white" in mind is the same as having "snow" in mind. Obviously, it's not. And so, because I'm having to have so much on my mind right now, and not just my education, I want to push it all as far away from me as possible (which, I think, might be why I didn't do any extra work when in high school, and which is why kids often hate the idea of learning--because they associate the "idea" of learning with "learning" itself, and because school sucks and school put the "idea" of learning in their minds because "school" and "learning" are supposed to be, in many ways, equivalent, at least to little kids and so forth, it all get fucked up). But that's not the way to make things better. But it's a reaction that is hard as fuck to overcome. Especially when you don't see any other way out. I would be more than happy to do all of this work, but given the time in which it is supposed to be done and so forth, I don't want to do it. Often, such points are overlooked. And then (as much of my problem has been tonight), how the fuck can they know when to distinguish between justified and unjustified fucking up? Tonight my progress has been delayed because while doing my work I got hit with a huge series of realizations and ideas, and it shook me so that I could no longer stay on task. I had to pursue some of those ideas, and the more I did so, the more I thought about the stuff I have been touching on in this entry (about how the "system" sucks, lah dee dah dee dah, etc.), and that eventually got me so riled up that I couldn't pursue my other line of thoughts, and so I'm left with a huge heap of bullshit and its stink is so overwhelming that I can't get away from it, and so more and more I'm sucked into hell, until there is nothing but hell. And that, my friends, is a brief and vague outline of the evolution of depression. But nobody wants to hear that, do they? Nooo. They want to have nothing to do with your "excuses." But they're interested when, say, a person kills him-/herself, aren't they? Of course. They don't realize what they are dealing with until their dealing is done as a result of something like that. We don't realize we are dealing with "persons" until it's too late, if we realize at all. Do you see how unethical this "system" forces us to be? God....I see it. I keep seeing it. I'm too fucking smart to do this. I hate bragging. I hate boasting. I hate all of that stuff. But it's true. Well, no, not exactly. I'm too smart in certain ways. It's not that I'm too "smart", exactly, but that the way my mind and thought/thinking works is quite different from most people's, for various reasons, and I am of above average intelligence, much closer to above than average, and this results in hell stemming from places where hell shouldn't stem for me. But it does. Why? Because I'm a person, and a person is complex as fucking hell. I mean, fucking hell. A bunch of universes walking around. It's fucking amazing. What happens when, in theory or whatever, a person should make all A's always, be the ideal student and role model, so on and so on and so forth, but isn't? What went wrong? What is going wrong? Well, we know that this person should have excelled (and, in addition, have been happy) in everything that s/he did in his/her life, if everything went as it should have in his/her. But this person hasn't excelled and s/he hasn't been happy. Something key, perhaps, to point out is that the person's unhappiness/discontent is the key ingredient to his/her not excelling. That is probably an important thing to point out. One thing that should be noted is that this person has been surrounded by people just has intelligent as s/he is, but these other people have excelled much more than s/he has. The reason (which would be the combination of numerous reasons) is difficult to point out, but, no doubt, has something to do with this person's attention to (I shall put it generally, for much is being included in the term) "ethics". Blah blah blah. I'm starting to lose my train of thought and don't really want to look back and pick it back up again. Basically, one of the largest problems I see with this "system" is it's "reductionist" thinking as opposed to (perhaps the more preferrable) "holistic" thinking. Especially when it comes to actions. By that I mean, not "concept" exactly (for much of our actions to not add, accordingly, to our concept(s)), but the actions we take in dealing with what we consider (though seperately) a "concept". Again, I'm specifially talking about "persons" now, and how our actions towards persons (people, whatever) are more like the actions one would take if being governed by a reductionist thinker, as opposed to a holistic thinker. But, of course, this doesn't work very well because a "person" is a holistic entity. I, Richard, am a single person, and every action I am associated with goes into my evolution, which can be understood in terms of a complex, but linear (essentially), causal chain. I develop on a fluid, continuous scale. I don't make pitstops. I don't wait for ten different sources to finish having their impact on me before I upgrade myself to the next point in my personal development. Each action (inta- and interaction--for can you really separate the two?) effects me at that time, and my next interaction must take my developed intra-action into account. If there is no room for that in a person's life, then a person's life is going to be shit. What I mean is, if a person is not allowed to develop on a continuous scale, but, rather, is expected (consiously or unconsciously, but expected just the same) to develop as a multiplicity of selves or something to the like, then that person is eventually going to be fucked up. Whether we recognize it sooner (as I did in high school) or later (as you hear about when a person is "grown up" with a job and a family and so on and then one day realizes that his/her life is shit and that s/he is miserable and so on), it's going to happen (usually--barring death and being weird, though I guess we would consider such a person very "normal", so that's fucked up). So anyway, I'm losing my train of thought again. So now I'm asking myself: should I go to class or not. I want to say, "no," because I don't feel like going because I'm scared of what the teacher my say, etc. etc. But I should say, "yes," because I'm in college to learn (which (kind of) goes against what Andy thinks college is about--learning how to live and so forth--but oh well, the only reason I ever looked forward to college was because I hoped that I'd finally be able to learn and shit--I want a good learning environment, and through that, I will "learn" to live--sometimes if you have what you need and really want (if you're happy/content), everything else just falls into place), and the purpose of class should be to provide us with a useful learning tool. So I should get really really stubborn and live and act strictly according to principle, etc. But that doesn't work because you ignore various aspects of reality and are, in that sense, pulling an ostrich (in that you are putting your head in a hole in the ground). But being honest with yourself is so painful, because you are being put through a system (I just want you all to know that I feel stupid saying "system" because it's used so much that it's almost cheesy, but you know what I mean) that hasn't been built to work in the interest of persons (not the people it is "supposed" to work for, anyway). So most people just deal with it. But I have a damn hard time doing that. I mean, fuck. Why should I deal with it? Because ____ and ____ and ____ and ____. But those reasons aren't ever very good. They are usually only in the superficial interests of the individual (the only way for the person to justify going through the hell), and don't take into account things like "now" (as in, living for the future, some future goal, and not the present, etc.) and things like the interests of others (everyone is miserable, and things are only going to get worse--think of the children) and a lot of other stuff. I'm getting tired of writing this entry. I still have so much I could say, but oh well. I don't know if anything I have said makes any sense (don't know how clear I was), but here it is anyway. Just do everyone a favor and start your own little rebellion. Let them know that this shit sucks, and if they're doing for you (like they're supposed to be) then they're doing a piss poor job of it (I'm talking about schooling, education, etc.), failing, in fact, and they need to get their fucking asses in line and start realizing that they are failing us and that the reason is because the system in general sucks ass and they need to start putting their time, money, and energy into starting some real change around here--not just buying new computers and shit like that, but real changes. Start by talking to the kids. Figure out what they really think. But adults can't get that out of kids. Kids are scared of adults. Kids are scared of failing. And so on. So kids are going to have to take fucking charge and break down the door and fucking scream at the dumbfuckingass adults and make them realize that what they're doing fucking sucks and everyone hates it--the adults and the kids--and that you're not gonna do jack shit until things start changing. They'll listen. They'll have to listen. The "system" is fragile. It's built upon an artificial power hierarchy, and all it takes are some people to realize that this power play is all a bunch of psychological smoke and mirrors and then to make other people realize this, and so on, until enough people refuse to deal with the bullshit, and so on and so forth. That's kinda what I was hoping to do with that speech in Ferguson's class where I just sat there. I was hoping to "inspire" some more people to do the same sorts of things. Of course, it was stupid to expect other people to put their asses on the line like that, but a guy can hope, can't he? Fuck yeah. That's all we've got. Hope and faith, man. They carry a lot of negative, religious baggage, but they are also very important and fundamental to our survival and progress. Hope and faith are really about the only two things that allow humans to work together as a group--everything from language to trust. It's quiet, but it's powerful. So now I'm really going to shut up. Here it is 7:35 in the morning, and I'm starting to get tired. Damn. I've fucked myself up, too. In a lot of ways. Think of it as my variation of self-mutilation, etc. It's a lot for one person to handle.