Brettia

I feel bad for not blogging in such a long time. And my last entry wasn’t even a very good one. I know it’s been forever since I said anything about moving or school or anything really, so now I’m going to try and put things right.

Right now I really don’t know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it, nor do I understand what I am feeling or why I am feeling it. I go through daily life cheerfully, normally, most of the time, but the looming threat remains, always waiting, always just over the horizon. I find it almost laughable that, a few months ago, I was worried that I wasn’t pushing myself hard enough, that I wasn’t doing enough work and extra-curricular activities, or at least not as much as my peers were doing. I saw other kids in my AP European History class working hard, heard them talking about their busy lives, and I wondered: how do I compare with them? Are my grades higher, my awards and nominations and recognitions better, or is everything I’m doing substandard by comparison? Now I know…it just doesn’t matter.

I could be valedictorian, go to Harvard Law School, start my own firm - and still have a crappy life. I could become the lead programmer for a major open-source project, the organizer of a globe-spanning effort - and still be antisocial. No matter what I do, there will never be a guarantee that I’m doing the right thing, or that my actions won’t harm someone else. The fact is, everything I do will hurt someone, in some way. The only way to please everyone is to be super-conservative and do nothing at all, and even then, someone would come along and be shocked that anyone could be so unproductive. (Note the subtle politics here.)

But if I know I need to do something, and I know that no matter what, I could still end up as an alcoholic down on Van Buren, what is the point? What is my eventual goal? To be able to live for the moment, do whatever I want, flaunt my riches in exotic places? To go on a mission to promote X religion in Y developing nation? What? I think…I think I need guidance. I don’t need help (nor do I want it), and I don’t need someone to feel sorry for me or to pity me or to try to make me feel better. And I don’t need advice, because any advice will always be the insignificant opinion of yet another lowly mortal such as myself. My arrogance, and the teachings of my instructors, will never let me value someone else’s opinion higher than my own, even if I have none. But if I don’t need all of these things, then what kind of guidance DO I need? Belief in a higher power who can give me instruction based on their own agenda?

But even that ends up getting shot down. I can only believe if I have proof, and having proof would significantly diminish the power of the being, whatever it might be, because proving the existence of something and making it definable and tangible in the human mindset brings it down to the level of the common man. This is why I cannot, and probably will never, believe in God. So do I just need to curb my arrogance and stop Descartes-ing out with it and thinking that the only real objects and concepts in the world are those that I can prove logically? Hasn’t it been said that our fallibility and dependence on things that might not be real is part of what makes us human?

As I’ve established, my problem is my lack of a goal, of something to strive toward. I don’t have a goal because all the common goals are impossible to reach. Yes, there has to be someone who wins the National Spelling Bee, and someone has to be valedictorian, and someone has to lead the Linux Kernel Project. But that someone will never be me, nor will it be any of the other 6.3 billion people in the world, except for one. And there will never be world peace, or global belief in God, or freedom from Wal-Mart, or an end to world hunger, or a cure for all disease. Even if one of these goals was eventually achieved, it would be such a large-scale project that any one person would be just one more name on the long list of credits.

Am I trying to say that I’ve given up? No. I’ll continue to do everything that I have always done: get good grades, learn more and more about computers, make new friends, go to movies, debate, read, etc. But that doesn’t mean I’ll feel good about it. I don’t want to progress through life always feeling like nothing is on the horizon except for death. I don’t want to feel as disillusioned as I do now forever. And I don’t want to die feeling like my life was a waste. Feel free to chime in with all the cliches that I hear so often: “no life is wasted”, “everyone is special”, “you can do anything if you put your mind to it”. We all know that if we really think about it, none of these phrases are true. A life can be wasted, though ‘wasted’ status is relative. Some people are special, but a great number of them are not and will die unremembered and un-cared-for. I can’t kill Osama bin Laden if I put my mind to it, because someone else will beat me to it, or he will die of old age first, spiting everyone who ever swore so-help-them-God that they would do the world a favor and end his miserable existence.

When I first read the Harry Potter books, I felt sorry for the kid, sorry that anyone should have to go through life without parents and with a power-crazed uber-wizard after them all the time. But now I realize: at least he has a goal. At least Harry has something to live for, something to work against, something that is above everything else: the petty schoolwork, friends, teachers…. I have to wonder, is this something that one can only have in their imagination? I don’t mean that I want someone to be trying to murder me on an almost-yearly basis. But I want something to work toward, some level of existence that has not yet been attained, that no one else will reach before me. I just have no idea what that is; I know only that I cannot go on like this, living such an empty-feeling life in the shadow of fictional characters that are somehow more real than the hyperreal crap that we are bombarded with daily: advertisements, movies, TV, media, miracle products…I am allowing myself to be overwhelmed, and I have no way of shielding myself from it all. I almost regret reading that book on postmodernism earlier this year, but I know I would have come to these conclusions sooner or later.

I was going to talk about school and stuff, but it almost doesn’t feel worth it. I don’t even want to go tomorrow. I don’t want to board the same bus, play the same game on my calculator, go to the same classes, eat the same junk food when I get home, do the same homework, like I always do. I want something different, but I don’t know what.

Not Dairy Queen.