Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Daily Report Card

I am in class right now. I'm sorry, Julia, if you ever find this blog somehow, because I think you're great. And I think it's a beautiful, if bitter irony that the topic of today's class is childhood interventions for ADHD.

And I am on my computer blogging not paying attention. That same dimension which, of course, is in deficit in the aforementioned disorder.

It's been some time since I have written in this self-serving and narcissistic blog. But I am trying to be more positive about my own personality traits, so that's why I've stopped staring into pools at my own reflection. Like Narcissus. I realize that this intellectual, Greek myth allusions like this one are also self-serving and byzantine.

I've been writing most of the day already, anyway. I'm in the Master's program in Clinical Psychological Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, and we've got a few papers due this week. These papers were assigned many moons ago, back in June. I began this term with grand and magnanimous plans of "getting everything done way ahead of time, totally." This behavioral goal long ago went out the proverbial window, but I figure having papers more or less finished a few days in advance is not a bad start in terms of reversing eons of criminal levels of procrastination.

I've been trying to make my sentences shorter. Only one comma allowed. But gotdamn, extra clauses are fun as goddamn hell. I've been trying to be more Hemingway, less Styron. More haiku, less Renaissance sonnet. More sniper fire, less machine-gun strafing. More

I think you get it.

But in terms of more existential tropes, it has indeed been a strange season in your boy's life, wandering about amongst the reeds as I do. I have direction, but sometimes the Universe presents amendments to the plan, and sometimes it takes the original idea and makes it come back to right where you expected it to be. Fuck; that sentence has two commas. And that last one had a semicolon.

Eh, Hemingway really actually wasn't that great anyway. Ketchum, Idaho is just not a great skiing destination.

Was that a low blow? Nah, just a little psychopathology black humor. I did like Old Man and the Sea though.

Back to loftier themes of existence: things have been interesting recently. I'm sure I'm not the first twenty-something to stand at the periphery of life and wonder what the hell is going on, and where the hell I am going. The more I ponder it - or rather, don't ponder it - the more I realize that life is just life, and there's only so much you can do to manipulate reality to your own devices. By this I do not mean that we should lilt about helplessly, fuck iting and saying there's nothing we can do about it anyway.

Not at all.

What I is saying is that there is a lot more you can do by watching, being a patient observer, and listening to those people and places and things that have seen and heard a lot more than you have. You're only as smart as you know you are not. Like Socrates said.

Descartes said he thought, therefore he was. I see what he was saying. But I think it's really more to the effect of " ."






Because life is ineffable, it defies words. It is meant to be lived, not decided. Let your life find you, and listen.


Profound nature shot to illustrate one of this post's points.