perfect, whether to fly?

ah, it feel so good to be able to power through a regular-sized book, one that doesn't have the density of a neutron star. i was questioning my english-major status for awhile on account of the mazes that pynchon has been dangling a carrot in front of me all the way through, but i set that one aside and picked up a few breathers, and now i feel like i can come back to it sometime soon. what a relief. this is what i love so much about life outside of the constructs of college....you get to make your own directions, and give up on things when you want to, and pick up different things when you catch sparks touching them. its a bit of a black hole at the same time though, and you really have to begin to get a grasp upon yourself and what your driving motivations are. i could easily see one small distraction spiraling into months and months of absent-minded debauchery without real direction. what's curious, though, is that even that sort of approach has its definite benefits....you never know what you will stumble into in a tempest, or what might stumble into you, and you might pinpoint something spasmodically instead of via the typical slow-n-steady routes...likely even a lot of interesting things that would have lain long away from your intended paths. there are ups and downs to that of course. but at a certain point perhaps you have to relinquish control to your body and spirit, and let them guide you unguarded. you have to know that you will still get somewhere, that you will still learn something, and you have to think that your ambitions will find their way towards what "you" would intend, even if the route is circuitous. it is kind of like surfing around on wikipedia for hours and hours....it seems in ways like a sinkhole, but you learn quite a bit....and you likely wouldn't have clicked onto that next progression unless you had at least a slight inkling towards it, consciously or unconsciously nudging you self-ward.

the world's a brilliantly complex state of affairs. it seems like one misstep in it can ruin or take a life; conversely, it can create an opportunity or conjure an idea. every moment of every day, we are confronted with choices we can make, that we usually don't even consider. perhaps you would call those blinders that we put on, 'personality'. it's interesting to hear that word in a negative context, isn't it? but how could we function without some semblance of ourselves? we would completely dissolve into the world and its vast machinery if nothing compelled us to some constancy. there are literally 360 degrees that we can travel in, from any set stance, and once we've taken a step, there our 360 options are again, but they have changed slightly. for ridiculousness' sake we'll leave out non-horizontal travel~ but we situate and we follow paths, wearing down the tracks of our own memory with repetition, like the stairs of hellems. it sort of digs little ditches for our feet, you see, but one supposes that it makes life more intelligible so it remains the standard. you really don't get a fair picture of it if you're already enmeshed...but travel a little, and you really begin to acknowledge what a difference time and place, and the tiniest choices that we make in our lives, have on the whole tapestry.

the sad part about acknowledging this is that you realize, at some point or another, that newness is really what makes the world inspiring, what makes existence creative. people complain as they get older; they complain about the acceleration of their years, and about how those throttling years are no longer 'golden' (a precious metal reference...i doubt that people would admit it, but they may literally feel that the later years are less valuable to them, overall, than those forged of gold). it's all in the paths that we run, or dig ourselves deeper into; it's all in the timing and the actual use of our time. you can say that newness fades because we collect experiences....that there is only so much to do and that it is inevitable that we pass beyond these vivacious times. i just think that, at this juncture, i would respectfully disagree. the choice to work an eight-hour day, a forty-hour week, is not a societal norm in many places. when we do this we are shackling ourselves, or willing it to be done to us by others~ workplaces are efficient; they are well-oiled machines and they tend to treat us like mathematical functions, like specific applications or gears in a project that is ongoing, never-ending and ever-growing in the ideal of the market. we work so that we can live, so that we can have money to explore or dig ourselves deeper if we choose...but we are under the impression that money is life and that we are being sold the means to life~ it's right at our fingertips, no work necessary, but our entire country, our entire world has been designed to make it seem like an absolute necessity, as though one cannot do without it. i have a lot of deep-seated issues with all this, but clearly i'm still in it playing the game. it definitely burns deep down in me sometimes.

and now we pass the time in this manner, and now our days become more and more clustered...our experiences more and more similar to one another, our days adrift and unchanging. i think this is the reason that people report life as 'accelerating'; i think that when you act as a single function, if that is what is expected of you, you spend long portions of time doing the exact. same. thing. every day, every week, year out. when we're youthful, when we're in college or high school or what have you, our moments are constantly fluctuating. new knowledge, new people, new places, new things to do, new music to listen to, new ambitions and hopes. jobs have a way of crushing ambitions, relegating us to the present, and cramming us into it in a way that it is surprising to me so many people put up with. we no longer have the *time* to do different things, to be new selves; if we were able to then it would compromise our current positions~ so our days become more selfsame, and we snowball along with them, rolling up layer upon layer of habit and similarity and convention to block us from experiencing the changes that are, in the end, so essential to the living spirit and to keeping life crisp and new.

i would like for people to put a more genuine effort into finding jobs which they will really enjoy and be rewarded by. i would like for myself to do this as well. i'm working on it, sort of, although not really in an amending-the-current-situation sort of way....i'm trying to explore, and find something which really inspires me to devote my energies to it. all this i'm doing on the side, and trying to stay active about it. in the meantime we do what we have to, i suppose; i'm just tired of seeing people work jobs that they have no affinity for, that they continue on it because it is the path of least resistance on account of their own digging into it. we can literally be worth whatever we put the effort into being worth; all of us.

mind is burnt. matches out~