That Heavy Emptiness

Your empty gaze meets mine and, for a second, we’re not empty anymore. Then we look away, and go on about our day, slowly acting out those familiar and meaningless motions.               Sometimes it’s just one thing that makes life worth living; just one thing that fills the void of existence (too much?)- a person, a hobby, a pet dog (or dragon), a passion. And when that one thing goes missing, we’re left with an emptiness that is, paradoxically, heavy.
               There are two ways to deal with emptiness: a gorgeous, romantic quest to find the missing piece (which, despite Hollywood’s best efforts, will not be a letdown like “it was right under my nose after all”) and denial.

Unfortunately people don’t go on “finding themselves” journeys anymore, and they probably won’t until the day the #FindYourselfChallenge becomes a thing (We’re in an age of practicality until it comes to social media...then it’s all “Let’s pour a bucket of pneumonia-giving ice water on our heads!” See ALS Ice Bucket Challenge).

So the only option left is DENIAL (cue Beethoven). The psychedelic, delirious, and altogether false state-of-mind that everything is going to magically fix itself without any real conscious thought. Denial is a dream-sleep of reality; it’s like walking zombie-like through a set of controlled circumstances. Denial is rejecting what could be a beautiful truth to live in a distorted lie, a lie that isn’t even your’s but someone else’s.

I look ahead of me and there they go, marching smart and tall and blind. Marching and marching and marching until they all go out of their minds.         
              Denial is losing awareness of what makes you happy and what fills your emptiness; it’s closing your eyes and letting someone else solve your problems - someone else who obviously can’t do it right.

                If you feel empty, don’t close your eyes. Open them.

The Optimist vs. the Realist

Excuse the collee talk, but as the deadlines approach thoughts about the future are all that will fuel my head :)

From: here

The pessimist in me has always made what will happen one day a very scary thought indeed. I’ve been toying with the idea of just drifting across the world, learning, observing and writing, and just earning my way through it all. It’s a romantic proposal, and, according to my parents, “impractical,” but I know it too; my life isn’t a Hollywood movie, I’m not going to go on an observer’s voyage; I’m not going to soak in, and learn about the world by actually experiencing it. I’m not going to have an epiphany mid-thought. At least, not yet.
                 I will go to college, and a heavy debt will befall me. It will hang in the air around me, wherever I go: a huge ominous sign in red - “$100,000 DUE”. My degree would hang next to it - in hopes that the dazzling nature of this piece of paper would distract attention from that menacing stain of red so close by. I will have a tangible proof of my resourcefulness, and some useful experience, and I may even have a job. I will work, and live. I will experience, and learn, but running at the back of my mind, would always be those words - $100,000 due.

               One day I will open an old high school journal, or maybe I’ll find this. I will laugh at my resolve to travel the world, and then, maybe, my eyes will fill with tears. I’ll think of how it had been a laughable idea, but also a well-loved one. I’ll daydream of quitting my job, and traveling out into the sun set, the perfect lighting making my skin glow.

But the optimist (whom I had to drag out from the shadows) suggests that maybe I will go to college, and it will be like travelling the world.
           I might get a college degree after four fondly remembered years, and pay back my student loans with a smile of remembrance. I might value the education that money actually got me.
           Maybe one day I will remember my high school dreams, and I might smile. Maybe I’ll smile at my naivete; at my belief that watching the world was the only way to learn, and that far off places are the best to observe. I’ll have something wiser to say then. Maybe by then I would have learnt not to regret. I might know something then that I don’t know of now.

The Ride Home

          A thrillingly confusing mixture of greek and arabic symbols whirl about my head as I run walk quickly to the waiting bus. I nonchalantly flash my card (the smoothness of it all still amazes me...Smooth is hardly a word that could define me) and head towards my seat, burying the numbers and letters in my head as I prep my mind for the best part of my day - the quiet ride home.

From: here

             In a widely spaced suburb, with its low extending buildings and occasional malls, cars are ubiquitous, and public transport is only a government formality. Everyone who’s anyone drives, and that leaves all those unwilling (or unable) to drive in the nobody category. When I clamber onto the bus everyday in the morning, I’m met by the silent ghostly stares of people whom I somehow never seem to spot in the outside world.
            Some peer out of their windows with troubled expressions, deep in thought; others stare straight ahead, an unsettling emptiness in their weary eyes. These people..they’ve seen, heard, and known so much - and not in the conventional sense of the word- I can see it in those expressions. It makes me feel extremely inexperienced in my just-learnt-so-much-in-a-controlled-environment face.
           The lady with her meagre snow-white hair in a bun sends shivers down my spine when she tries to smile at me; the mellow greetings of the smart-looking old man with his beaten-up briefcase echo with tiredness; the quiet young woman who stares out into the darkness shakes her head to herself occasionally - she seems stuck between conflicting emotions every time I see her.

Public Transport isn’t for everyone - especially in the suburbs. It seems like a special place for those who can’t afford to whiz through life with their fast cars and loud stereos. It’s a place to slow down, and think; a place to revel in the quietness and the silentness of all those others who seem to have settled comfortably into the shadowy nobody status.

Quote of the Day ~ Kant

I like to think that the tears that welled up in my eyes when I submitted my first college application today was some sort of bodily disorder, but five hours on and I'm still alive. 

I think I cried of relief when I clicked that submit button. 

Oh well, one done; six to go...

Anyway, I should probably introduce this quote before I go start a pity party haha. I was going to do a Cheshire Cat themed Halloween post (I appreciate Hollywood's latest depiction of that cat; now he's just creepy enough to be a Halloween costume!), but then Immanuel Kant came along, and I now have a Cheshire Cat meets Kant quote analysis..

I was a bit shocked when I first read this quote. That’s the kind of blatant pessimism no one really wants to hear. That happiness is impossible in our world unless we imagine it is probably the rudest thing anyone could say about it. Right?

Is the American Dream dead?

But, before I pronounce the idea dead, I need to find its corpse (excuse the analogy), because the American Dream is as elusive as the Higgs Boson.
        I posted a discussion on BlogCatalog last week, and I received such an overwhelmingly diverse collection of definitions for this one ideal, that I've decided to clarify what the American Dream is (or at least what I think it is) before I hold a funeral service...

Here are some of the ideas I heard from my discussion:

"[the American Dream is]getting a good job, getting married, buying a house and having kids who did a little bit better than you. " ~ Rhumperd

Quote of the Day ~ Carl Sandburg

Last week my English teacher pointed out that "quote" is a verb, and the noun form of the verb should be "quotation". So this post series of mine, should actually be named "Quotation of the Day" (I don't like it either). Isn't that ridiculous?

             We've all gotten so used to saying "Quote of the Day" that we don't even realize that it's grammatically wrong (can you imagine the number of other things we're doing wrong and don't notice because we do them all the time?).

Anyway, here's the quotation:

   

At one time, Carl Sandburg was one of the most talked about men in America. I can imagine that he comes from a time when the American dream of a rags-to-riches story was still alive and burning, a time when the country was still idealistic. 

I'm not a (complete) nostalgic, but maybe the world was a better place in the 1960s...I mean what's happened to the American Dream today? Where's the idealistic optimism for change?

What's the Use of Social Experiments?

My weekly art requirement is met by my weekend movie (or two or three). Last week, I watched a TV movie called The Pregnancy Project. It’s an adaptation of true-story about a Washington State high schooler - Gaby Rodriguez - who pretended to be pregnant to study the social stigma towards teen moms. This was, I learned, a social experiment.

                 I’ve never thought of society as a laboratory, and I’ve never dreamed of testing my hypotheses. But that is exactly what Gaby Rodriguez did- she had a hypothesis: that girls who accidentally became pregnant in high school were stereotyped and belittled for their mistake, and she had her model to test the hypothesis: pretending to have an unplanned teen pregnancy. What she found were what was expected, people sighing about her being a waste, and classmates jeering at her unideal future prospects.