Junior Year Blues

I don't like doing homework for the same reasons that I don't like cleaning my room.  Even after you finish, you know you'll be doing it again soon.  Ideally, I would be able to accept my workload day by day, without letting the papers or clothes pile up.  Realistically, I just...don't.

My occupation is student, but are scholarly pursuits supposed to occupy every part of my being? Is anything supposed to occupy every part of my being?  But what is life without obsession?  We need something to trust, we crave constants: God, learning, love, hate.  One day I walked into school and smiled, thinking, "I can always count on school to be cold and monotonous, I can count on kids in the hallway to be assholes, I can count on these aluminum tiles, concrete walls, and fluorescent lights."

At this point in my life, I feel pressured to make school my obsession, schoolwork my constant, a swollen brain my goal.  I do like learning, but it's the authoritative pressure that makes me hesitate, and many high schoolers would probably agree with me. I do not think we are teenage rebels. I do not think the term "teenage rebel" is fair.  It is a term coined by adults, who believe we are pests to be controlled, not humans capable of making their own decisions.

If I were free, maybe I would choose to complete my homework.

For now, I'm going to go downstairs and "play the devil's music" on the guitar. Bye.

I must have been only two or three years old, but I vividly remember coveting my neighbor's favorite stuffed animal, which must have been some sort of dog-bear hybrid, with a scratched up black nose, a worn out, floppy body, completely furless and threadbare in many places, especially along the seams.  None of my stuffed animals' appearances seemed to shout out "look at me! I am so well loved"; instead, their fur was plentiful and clean, their plastic eyes seemed glazed over, staring at nothing, and their sewed-on smiles seemed phony.  A bit more vaguely, I remember trying to dirty them up, but being dissatisfied with the results.  You can't force that kind of love.

Well, why is it that we are attracted to vintage clothing?  Holes in our jeans?  Antiques? We want to look experienced, even though we are still about as mature as our toddler selves, purposefully dragging our toys through the mud.  We're all so eager to prove ourselves as authentic people,  the tried and true.  We'll gobble up traditions and claim them for ourselves, argumentum ad antiquitatem.  There's corned beef and cabbage on my table tonight, on this Saint Patrick's day, as there was this time last year, and as there will be this time next year.  Harmless, perhaps, but when will we invent our own meal?  We're successful, I think, when others find something in us or about us admirable enough to copy.  Maybe, after they follow our path for a short while, they'll see that they will find more when they branch off.  Maybe they will learn to love their own stuffed animals.

yes please