16 February 2014
It's a struggle, sometimes, to take myself off factory setting. Practiced actions become routine. I wake up, I brush my teeth, I take out my contacts, I take a shower. I drive to school, park, walk to class. Go home. Do homework. Rinse and repeat.
I don't find myself interesting anymore. Getting into conversations is a burden; I never have an answer for, "How have you been?" I've been good, right? I've always been good, or okay. My every day is the norm, and the norm is okay. The norm is middle ground, familiar territory. We can live with everyday life; in fact, we do. I do. A harder question: "So, what've you been up to?" What have I been up to? The normal: eating, studying (minimally), sleeping. Quidditch, sometimes, if I can drag myself to practice. But after two and a half years, this, too, becomes routine. (Does Pokemon count? I haven't even been playing that, recently, though, and I'm not sure how much personal vices count as socially acceptable forms of recreation.)
Remember freshman year? Remember when going out to eat was something to be savored, cherished, because of its relative infrequency? Remember when you went to that Dream Theater concert by yourself, a little eighteen-year-old girl traveling downtown alone by public transportation? Your parents freaked out, remember? You embarrassed yourself in front of guys you weren't intent on impressing anyway. Give current-day you some of that spontaneity; heaven knows she needs it.
Now, each day is boring. You can only spend so much time online, looking at the same sites over and over again, before that, too, becomes boring. I mean, how low of a low has your life hit when you find yourself literally refreshing the same few sites over and over for updates in order to procrastinate on your schoolwork which is really all you do these days anyway. How pathetic do you have to be to be driven to this state. Man. I need something to do. Somewhere to go. People to meet. Half the time I find myself wanting to drop out of school, if only to have a story to tell. Plus the fact that I don't see myself going into fields related to either of my majors, though I'm probably going to end up going into computational linguistics. Feels like selling my soul to the devil, though not as bad as earlier this year when I pretty much turned down a job with The Princeton Review. Why does it feel like no matter how much I resist, I'm going to end up as a cog in the machine that is big business?
I need a break. A break in which I do fun things. Interesting things. Things that will make me grow as a person. I'm going to visit a friend in Illinois at the end of the month. Maybe I can be interesting in Illinois.
Maybe I'm too hard on myself.
(I've also just been really tired lately, the kind of exhaustion that settles around your bones, sticking there. Today I got all-out sick so maybe that's why.)
I don't find myself interesting anymore. Getting into conversations is a burden; I never have an answer for, "How have you been?" I've been good, right? I've always been good, or okay. My every day is the norm, and the norm is okay. The norm is middle ground, familiar territory. We can live with everyday life; in fact, we do. I do. A harder question: "So, what've you been up to?" What have I been up to? The normal: eating, studying (minimally), sleeping. Quidditch, sometimes, if I can drag myself to practice. But after two and a half years, this, too, becomes routine. (Does Pokemon count? I haven't even been playing that, recently, though, and I'm not sure how much personal vices count as socially acceptable forms of recreation.)
Remember freshman year? Remember when going out to eat was something to be savored, cherished, because of its relative infrequency? Remember when you went to that Dream Theater concert by yourself, a little eighteen-year-old girl traveling downtown alone by public transportation? Your parents freaked out, remember? You embarrassed yourself in front of guys you weren't intent on impressing anyway. Give current-day you some of that spontaneity; heaven knows she needs it.
Now, each day is boring. You can only spend so much time online, looking at the same sites over and over again, before that, too, becomes boring. I mean, how low of a low has your life hit when you find yourself literally refreshing the same few sites over and over for updates in order to procrastinate on your schoolwork which is really all you do these days anyway. How pathetic do you have to be to be driven to this state. Man. I need something to do. Somewhere to go. People to meet. Half the time I find myself wanting to drop out of school, if only to have a story to tell. Plus the fact that I don't see myself going into fields related to either of my majors, though I'm probably going to end up going into computational linguistics. Feels like selling my soul to the devil, though not as bad as earlier this year when I pretty much turned down a job with The Princeton Review. Why does it feel like no matter how much I resist, I'm going to end up as a cog in the machine that is big business?
I need a break. A break in which I do fun things. Interesting things. Things that will make me grow as a person. I'm going to visit a friend in Illinois at the end of the month. Maybe I can be interesting in Illinois.
Maybe I'm too hard on myself.
(I've also just been really tired lately, the kind of exhaustion that settles around your bones, sticking there. Today I got all-out sick so maybe that's why.)