That analogy works a lot better if your work is on actual paper.
Still feeling bored and depressed. That’s why I am doing my blogging so early. I need a dose of at least mildly purposeful action or I will just end up sleeping the time away.
I am getting really tired of video games. And without them, what the fuck do I do with my time?
At least I am reading again. I had a good run going of reading before bed instead of, or after, entertaining myself with my tablet, but then I lost track of the book and started playing video games again, which is maddeningly futile.
You can’t get to sleep by stimulating your mind. Or at the very least, I can’t.
So yesterday, I made the conscious choice to forget the book I had been reading, and start reading something else. By doing so, I cut the Gordian knot and escaped the gumption trap I had fallen into.
“Gumption trap” is a great phrase. I should use it more often. If I thought of more of my problems as traps, I might have a stronger will to escape them.
Because if there is one thing I am good at, it’s escape.
Hopefully, this sad mood I have been in will be dispersed once I have been to class today. Normally, on Tuesdays, I have class from 1 till 7, but once more Journalism 101, the first class, is canceled. This time, it’s because the prof has to go to his brother’s wedding in Hawaii.
I’m sure he misses us all terribly, though.
So today it’s Psych 1200 only, which starts at 4. Hopefully, we will be getting our exam results today. I mean, they made us do it on one of those irritating Scantron sheets (Be sure to fill in the circle completely with a Number 5 pencil) and you would assume that would lead to fast results.
I have never liked that kind of testing. Such cramped, fussy little things. When I was younger and more fearful, I was intensely paranoid about somehow doing the test “wrong” and failing because I didn’t fill in the circle right.
I mean, asking someone with my fine motor/vision issues to fill in those circles completely, but without going outside them, is basically the equivalent of asking a regular person to balance a teacup on their nose while jogging.
So I just concentrated on making sure the circle was full and didn’t worry about going slightly outside the circle. The most important thing is for there to be no pencil markings in any of the other circles, and I had that down pat.
Anyhoo, by all reason, our results should be back today, and so today I will get the results of my ad hoc experiment to see just how goddamned smart I am. Psych 1200 is the one where I had no idea it was exam day until I showed up, so I did absolutely no studying and had to rely entirely on what I actually remembered combined with my test brightness and logical deductive capacities. Which is pretty much how I sailed through school for most of my life.
So it might work. I might get a good mark regardless. I’ve done it plenty of other times in my life. Granted, this time I had the extra double plus challenge of not having the textbook, but what the hell. I did the best I could under the circumstances. The universe can ask no more of a person.
Regarding my sadness and boredom (my sad boredom? My bored sadess?), I think it will prove to be a good thing in the long run. This is another one of those evolutionary processes where I need to transform myself, and the kind of metamorphosis I need requires a lot of energy in order to escape the gravity well of my depression.
That energy can only come from things like discontent, boredom, or irritability. Once more, I have to let the energy build up until it finally becomes so intolerable that I have to do something about it, and it will be that explosion that gives birth to a newer, better version of myself, which has much less dragging it down.
Speaking hedonistically, I would prefer that my problems were solved via overwhelming joy and sunshine from a rich and powerful outside source, but that is not in the cards for me, so instead, it’s a long succession of cold, painful evolutions.
Maybe the joy and ecstasy route is closed to us cold rationalists whose minds are not open to the transcendental because we have honed our minds into precision machines bent on the truth at all costs, and thus cannot grasp purely internal realities with the intuitive acceptance of the mystic or the holy man.
Everything must pass our interior tests for validity or be disregarded as noise. We can analyze ourselves till the cows come home, but we can’t unlock the doors within us with the very rationalism that put the walls there in the first place.
I know that the brutal truth machine within me is not necessarily my friend. I know that its ruthless machinery brutalizes me as often as it helps me, and that its fine, fine scalpel cuts my soul as often as it cuts away the lies.
But it’s all I have. No, that’s not true. More accurate to say that I am addicted to its output and in order to maximize that output, and the feeling of power and insight it gives me, I give it full rein to go wherever it wants regardless of the damage done to me in the process.
I can’t say that’s the perfect way to run my railroad, but it’s gotten me where I am today : nowhere.
Oh well. Time to stop bleeding on the page for today. I am going to take a nap (assuming I am still sleepy when I am laying down… no certain thing, that) and then head off to school to discover my fate.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.