Mood swings.

May 11, 2005 22:57

In the past few hours I had a couple of very strong emotions. The first was this inexplicable feeling that my life was revving up to something exciting and awesome. Then this got totally neutralized by the realization that my life is totally academic in every sense of the word.* ("Realization" isn't the right word. It's more like it arose like a 70's B-movie monster from the bog in which it had been forcibly submerged. Anyway, it's still bogus.)

I guess I'll go waste some more precious minutes of my life playing bullshit Flash games. Or maybe I'll check my e-mail another five times.


PITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYMEPITYME!!!!

Actually, better yet, don't. Because I'm not so pathetic that I need your sympathy. What I need is to be able to force a major personality change in myself. Or abolish my desire, Buddha style.

Whenever I find myself having just written an angsty post, I reach this moment of epiphany where I am ashamed of myself for writing such crap, and then am faced with the decision of allowing myself to post it or not. On the one hand, if I have already thought through the moment of angst and destroyed it with the left-brain, System 2 jackhammer, why bother communicating? On the other hand, I can rationalize submitting the post in order to document the real life-and-times of myself, so that future-me or somebody else can look back and understand accurately what goes on in my head.

More revelations then come in quick succession: First, that despite myself, there's this itch to bitch to the world about my discontent which I recognize as a weakness but find bogus rationalizations for anyway. There's something uncomfortably inauthentic about it--I want to equate it with the addict in Being and Nothingness, but I can't claim to have a clear enough memory of anything in that book to refer to it with confidence. Anyway, the point is that I am on the very edge of deciding to not continue writing, to not hit the "Update Journal" button, but I go ahead and do it anyway.

That is basically all of human frailty right there, right?

The next revelation I normally leave out, with the full knowledge that I'm biasing all of these psychological reports by leaving out the dominant detail; namely, that I suspect that basically all my discontent with life is due to sexual frustration. Like, throughout my life, when I have looked towards others and thought "Wow, they are really living--I wish I lived as brilliant or as interesting a life as they do...," what that really means is that I was jealous of the ass that they were getting.

It's uncomfortable saying this as it's kind of a taboo subject and all, but somewhere I have to leave it as a note so that when I look back I can reinterpret every time I've ever said anything regarding having a lame life or having lost youth or whatever.

I think that this is pretty inescapably human as well. I mean, no matter what else I do, I'm a total failure as a natural animal. No wonder all my hormones are screaming inadequacy at me.

Never mind what I'm going to do about it, since the answer is, as always, absolutely nothing. The question is whether I should stop complaining about my petty, bourgeoisie, non-issues. I guess I'm welcoming people to weigh in on this, although I'm wary of the responses, because of the same sort of bias that goes into Nietzsche's slave morality: it's good for everybody else, maybe, if I debase myself, ridicule myself, expose my weaknesses, etc. And for that reason they might give me positive reinforcement because of that, and thereby convince me that I am somehow in the right.

So the question is really posed as an appeal to the ubermensch in you and asking whether, in your opinion, the ubermensch in me should keep being a whiner.

Finally, I get this revelation that what was supposed to be a pithy, two-line, witty comment has EXPLODED into a sprawling...not pithy, several paragraph angst-fest. BallSACK!

*ac·a·dem·ic
adj.

1. Of, relating to, or characteristic of a school, especially one of higher learning.
2.
1. Relating to studies that are liberal or classical rather than technical or vocational.
2. Relating to scholarly performance: a student's academic average.
3. Of or belonging to a scholarly organization.
4. Scholarly to the point of being unaware of the outside world. See Synonyms at pedantic.
5. Based on formal education.
6. Formalistic or conventional.
7. Theoretical or speculative without a practical purpose or intention. See Synonyms at theoretical.
8. Having no practical purpose or use.
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