don't postpone joy.

yourself.

Make fun of your life- the good and bad, the mundane and exciting, the thing and its opposite- and laugh at that ridiculous individual that lives in the mirror. Humor is generally tragedy sped up and science has proven it is 83% more effective in helping us deal with whatever weighs on the mind and disturbs our content. Happiness is achieved not from an absence of life’s messiness, but the ability to humor the situation, deal with it, and keep the party going. 

I feel very strongly about this. 

It’s nature, shit happens and it’s awesome! 

“But my experience is that personal philosophies have a shelf life of about two weeks. Things’ll change.” 

-Jerry Levov in American Pastoral by Philip Roth.

Is it possible to really know a person? To thoroughly understand any individual, with all those unknown or ignored intentions, motives, consequences and meanings that govern the surprising irregularity of human affairs? I have always wanted to believe that “of course I’m right about (insert-name-of-person-I’ve-known-intimately-for-years)” and that the best of friends or most devoutly impassioned soul mates are brought into existence by achieving this.  

However, upon consideration it becomes impossible to deny that the amount of all that is unknown about people- including yourself!- is astonishing. Even more stunning is the importance placed on getting people right and what’s accepted as “knowing.” 

Do I contradict myself? 
Very well then I contradict myself, 
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

-Song of Myself by Walt Whitman 

I, for one, contradict myself accidentally or with thoughtful purpose on average thrice a week. These contradictions range from trivial (like my refusal to eat fish due to its distasteful “fishiness” for years followed by a swift change in my taste buds’ preference), to more significant, usually due to the expiration of a personal philosophy that Jerry Levov insightfully identifies above. This freedom to change as required or pleased is one I admire and even respect for all humans, but is also an insurmountable obstacle to really getting to know one another. As are the countless details and circumstances that everyone’s life individually contains.

When faced with this knowledge it seems obvious enough that thinking you totally get your closest friends, that-Celebrity-you-hate, your romantic partner, your Mom/Dad/Sibling/Roommate/etc. is ridiculous, unfounded, and futile. But don’t we nearly daily find ourselves jumping to those satisfying assumptions in order to become content with our “correct” judgement of others as reality? That leap, so easily made thanks to the net of self-made, perception-affirming conclusions appearing to catch us?  

It’s so damn easy to roll through life with a closed mind because that’s the automatic setting. Nobody wants to constantly remember how wrong they are, that sucks. So the obvious solution is to approach this significant business of getting other people right without any shallowness or superficiality or unreal expectations or intimidating presumptions. And despite the open mind, the approach of humble equality, we’ll never fail to get each other wrong- before and in anticipation of the meeting, while the exchange is taking place, and later in recalling the interaction- because we are simply not built to envision each other’s invisible goals or internal processes. 

This is okay with me. Since acknowledging the impossibility of ever being completely right about the often wonderful people in my life my optimism and idealism have achieved greater (and likely more annoying) levels, and I’ve found myself equipped with more patience with, acceptance of, and less negativity directed towards other people.  

“Getting people right is not what living is about anyway. It’s getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, wrong again. That’s how we know we are alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that- well, lucky you.” 

The above quote, also from American Pastoral, summarizes this idea wonderfully. It’s just another one of life’s little difficulties brought around by this whole being human thing, and if we can CTFO then lucky us indeed. 

and I agree. I can’t help but resent the requirement of sleep. More specifically, the need to sleep born from how totally useless it is to try and be productive without it irritates me. 

Don’t get me wrong- I enjoy sleeping, dreaming, and napping and historically I’ve even made bold claims of aiming to beat the average human, who spends a mere third of life asleep, by snoozing away half of my own time on Earth. 12 hours a day, boom. Today, however, I have a plethora lists (including lists of lists I intend on making- I kid you little) of so many captivating and useful things I want to do. Being tired prevents me from this nonstop pursuit of awesomeness.

In fact, here is a list of reasons I currently resent sleep:

1. General Decline in Time for Preferred/Excellent Activities. This one’s obvious, as about eight hours are lost to that essential cycle of tossing, turning, snoring and dreaming. The free time I have while awake is not enough for me to think about all the thoughts I have or see friends or do anything productive really. More importantly, due to discomfort whilst attempting to snooze, I have to take off the Kings of All Slippers:

2. Less Time to Read, either for pleasure or for education. After the exhilarating Black Friday book-buying extravaganza this is the biggest reason I want “five more minutes!” to stay awake. Most often I find myself fighting fatigue to satiate my curious speculation as to a novel’s conclusion or what the Anglo-Saxon legal system was really all about. Sleeping makes this 83% more difficult. 

3. Listlessness. Engaging in REM renders me incapable of writing anything. This means that while asleep I can’t make lists. Probably.

There are more reasons, but of course I am too le tired to properly address them. And don’t want a nap.

P.D. Wodehouse thinks that after the age of 21 one shouldn’t be out of bed and awake at four in the morning as the hour breeds thought, and boy is he right. At 21 life is all future and can be examined with impunity. Lucky me, I’ve got round about nine years until life becomes an unsettling mix of past and future and should only be analyzed with the sun flooding the world with optimism and warmth. And this irreplaceable youth is partially wasted by sleeping so often. 

So I’ve been awake for round about 22 hours at this moment. The aching muscles, tired eyes, and frustrating death of optimal cognitive functioning that inevitably result from too many hours without sleep are so indifferent and insurmountable that this is a useless, errorful post (brought to you by said frustrating death of cognitive function.) It took this long for me to arrive at this conclusion due to severe sleep deprivation. And that’s another reason I wish I was immune to tiredness. 

Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals.  

-Vladimir Nabokov

‘Tis quite humorous
To hear the weather’s snow joke-
Water’s powerful.
//

It’s no big secret that I love haikus (especially if I’ve signed your yearbook- I did so mostly in haiku form) and their simple, short structure. Don’t be fooled- the brevity of this form of poetry hardly impedes its beauty or profundity. The power three lines and seventeen moras* can potentially hold is a great one that, with the rare truly well-written haiku, illustrates that you don’t need to be loquacious to make a point and the right word makes all the difference. 

The haiku above was my response to the expensive snow fall that’s disabled Georgia and confined people to their location for four days now. Reading it out loud may help understanding it if you’re confused (wordplay is awesome and not stupid, admit it Sarika!) as will the context of how ill-equipped GA proved to be against six inches of frozen precipitation. 

It really did inspire awe and a modicum of resentment in me that despite all the advancements we marvel at and congratulate (or, for some, hate and criticize) we have not progressed enough to defeat frozen water. Elements of nature will remain beyond our control, and that is a humbling thought for us self-proclaimed Rulers of Existence. We seem to possess a sense of invincibility in our reign over the Earth via the progress of technology and science. When faced with a demonstration of an inability on our part to overcome the weather’s forceful ability to decisively impact our plans with the disregard of the atmosphere, the general reaction is of shock, frustration, and to purchase alarming amounts of bread and milk for those with foresight. I think the Universe, much like an adult does with regards to the middle-high school tier of teenagers or I do to my cat Lex, shakes Its head and laughs mockingly at the foolish attitude of indestructibility coupled with superiority. 

If God or the Universe really is a comedian performing to an audience too afraid to laugh (as Voltaire once said) then this is one of the ironic Bits, a wry joke callously told in infinite snowflakes, inflected by fluctuating low temperatures and with a punch-line of futility that’s so easily overlooked. I’m not quite laughing, but I get it well enough. At least until I forget again. 

*I recently learned the distinction between moras and syllables. A mora is a unit of time that determines syllable weight while a syllable is a unit of organization for a speech’s sound sequence.