oh my, mid life crisis ahoy.
Desk job is evil. Every day I find I have less and less to say to my fellow intern, not because he's uninteresting or that I desire to be sullen, but because the mornings leave me sapped of the desire to wake up. Things you only realise when you're doing something you shouldn't be doing: how much better you were at doing the things you are meant for. I've never had a real problem getting up at 6 in the morning to go to school, because it was school and the leeching of facts and the wonderment of everything. I never wanted to stay back late as much as I did when I was mopping up the carcinogenic mess in the darkroom. I could've stayed on my feet for more than the 13 hours I used to spend with my eye behind a lens. And, once upon a time, when I opened up this journal page with the intent to write, I wrote until the clatter of my fingernails against my keyboard drove me nuts, made me whip out the clippers to pare them down, and then it would be tapping, tapping again.
Tangent: the more time I spend behind a desk, the more I think about what I want to do with this most crucial decade of my life, and how "behind a desk" is not it. Thought: I want to open up a tearoom, where people can come, sit, drink tea, pass the time. I want to research what I sell, I want to one day grow what I sell. I want to make tea in a sustainable way that makes other people happy, on both ends of the production-consumption cycle. I want to be doing it with friends, and with other people who would want to spend their early years painting walls and risking things instead of sitting waiting for the rest of their life to begin.
I want to become something more than a humanities major, because at the end of 1 year in The System the thought is this: you can learn humanity at any time. It's the privilege of being human: the art of history, social sciences, language etcetera, those arts -- they are with you always. Within your soul, battered by evolution into your DNA. At the very least I feel like it's here in mine: I end a year in this field feeling like I know less than I did when I began, and that's fine. The study doesn't end. Neither does the study go anywhere, unless pared with something more tangible, something I can do with my hands.
At night, when my ennui-blasted head has the time to come back into itself, I get ideas, the ones that I don't get when away at university because there the pretence of learning covers up the failures of syallabatic (I WILL MAKE WORDS UP IF I WANT TO) education. WHAT IS IT TO BE ALIVE? It is more than to sit and to shit and to sleep.
Xabi once told me that I ought to do what I want, even if that didn't seem like the way to make much $$$, because either way I would end up making the same thing. If I woke up wanting to be tortured into joy by what I did I would find ways to make money, and I wouldn't mind when I didn't. If I spend the rest of the next 25 years hating who I see in the mirror and only ever being satisfied when I earn a raise, what next? What next?
I want to learn physics instead of metaphysics, I want to paint my walls instead of reading the writing on it, I want to take pictures again, read code again, be so afraid that I can't help but make each leap and run on momentum; everything has been second hand, description, the art of drawing language together because stealing the accents, ideas and words off of the lives of others has been a good substitute for filling my own negative space.
UNPAID INTERNSHIPS ARE SHITE, EXCEPT FOR THE FIRST ONE: because the first one will inevitably teach you never to do the same thing again, unless it is for something you absolutely love, and then it won't be called an internship, will it:?
PAYMENT IS A MEANS TO AN END, and if that end is "retirement" then I think "living" has become a secondary aim in life.
LIFE IS A SCARY MOTHER, and I'm not sure where it is going at all, but I think I am more ready for the next semester in which I find out.
SPLITTING YOUR LIFE ACROSS 2 OCEANS IS VERY HARD AND VERY BAD, because time is what you need to get things done, and friends are what you need to get it done with. Sometimes you can't have both, and then you will want to curl up into a ball and weep about opportunity costs.
THINGS I AM GOING TO DO IN THE NEXT THREE YEARS:
- INTERNSHIP: at an architectural or hospitality or scientific institution
- EDUCATION: take up and persist in a science; go to Japan and perfect my third language
- ART: restart drawing if I have to snap my fingers in half to do so because it is simply better for the mind; perfect my darkroom skills
- SERVICE: redesign websites for NPOs that need them
SO IF IT'S BETWEEN LIVING BEHIND A DESK FOR SOMEONE ELSE AND FINDING A DESK THAT I CAN CALL MY OWN I THINK I CHOOSE THE PATH LESS TAKEN BECAUSE THAT WILL MAKE ALL THE MOTHERLOVING DIFFERENCE?
What have you always wanted to do that you have never done?
Tangent: the more time I spend behind a desk, the more I think about what I want to do with this most crucial decade of my life, and how "behind a desk" is not it. Thought: I want to open up a tearoom, where people can come, sit, drink tea, pass the time. I want to research what I sell, I want to one day grow what I sell. I want to make tea in a sustainable way that makes other people happy, on both ends of the production-consumption cycle. I want to be doing it with friends, and with other people who would want to spend their early years painting walls and risking things instead of sitting waiting for the rest of their life to begin.
I want to become something more than a humanities major, because at the end of 1 year in The System the thought is this: you can learn humanity at any time. It's the privilege of being human: the art of history, social sciences, language etcetera, those arts -- they are with you always. Within your soul, battered by evolution into your DNA. At the very least I feel like it's here in mine: I end a year in this field feeling like I know less than I did when I began, and that's fine. The study doesn't end. Neither does the study go anywhere, unless pared with something more tangible, something I can do with my hands.
At night, when my ennui-blasted head has the time to come back into itself, I get ideas, the ones that I don't get when away at university because there the pretence of learning covers up the failures of syallabatic (I WILL MAKE WORDS UP IF I WANT TO) education. WHAT IS IT TO BE ALIVE? It is more than to sit and to shit and to sleep.
Xabi once told me that I ought to do what I want, even if that didn't seem like the way to make much $$$, because either way I would end up making the same thing. If I woke up wanting to be tortured into joy by what I did I would find ways to make money, and I wouldn't mind when I didn't. If I spend the rest of the next 25 years hating who I see in the mirror and only ever being satisfied when I earn a raise, what next? What next?
I want to learn physics instead of metaphysics, I want to paint my walls instead of reading the writing on it, I want to take pictures again, read code again, be so afraid that I can't help but make each leap and run on momentum; everything has been second hand, description, the art of drawing language together because stealing the accents, ideas and words off of the lives of others has been a good substitute for filling my own negative space.
UNPAID INTERNSHIPS ARE SHITE, EXCEPT FOR THE FIRST ONE: because the first one will inevitably teach you never to do the same thing again, unless it is for something you absolutely love, and then it won't be called an internship, will it:?
PAYMENT IS A MEANS TO AN END, and if that end is "retirement" then I think "living" has become a secondary aim in life.
LIFE IS A SCARY MOTHER, and I'm not sure where it is going at all, but I think I am more ready for the next semester in which I find out.
SPLITTING YOUR LIFE ACROSS 2 OCEANS IS VERY HARD AND VERY BAD, because time is what you need to get things done, and friends are what you need to get it done with. Sometimes you can't have both, and then you will want to curl up into a ball and weep about opportunity costs.
THINGS I AM GOING TO DO IN THE NEXT THREE YEARS:
- INTERNSHIP: at an architectural or hospitality or scientific institution
- EDUCATION: take up and persist in a science; go to Japan and perfect my third language
- ART: restart drawing if I have to snap my fingers in half to do so because it is simply better for the mind; perfect my darkroom skills
- SERVICE: redesign websites for NPOs that need them
SO IF IT'S BETWEEN LIVING BEHIND A DESK FOR SOMEONE ELSE AND FINDING A DESK THAT I CAN CALL MY OWN I THINK I CHOOSE THE PATH LESS TAKEN BECAUSE THAT WILL MAKE ALL THE MOTHERLOVING DIFFERENCE?
What have you always wanted to do that you have never done?