Life and Death of Summer

Last week of work for me before I get the summer off before I take a week of mental health break. It's been trying and what not. Lots of little things: small victories and small defeats, but we'll see what comes of anything. I'm not too much in the mood to talk about myself, so here's some random writing:

It should be of note that Edna Darling is a completely ordinary woman. She has never been featured on the cover of Gardeners Bimonthly, nor has she been recognized as the premier bassist in the Midwest. Her name has not graced the surface of a state volleyball trophy won in championships of her senior year, and not one person has heard the poetry that she writes and keeps under her mattress during rainy days. In short, she is a completely normal, albeit unrecognized, human being. What reason then is there to talk about her?

There. Right there, in the time that it took for us to cover her non-accomplishments, Edna did something extraordinary. In her living room furnished with a few antiques and mostly IKEA furniture, walls covered in lethargic yellow paint almost 10 years old, and TV that has not been turned on in 4 months, she has done the impossible. She has decided to take a class in yoga.

Now you might ask: Why is this so important? and I will tell you. It isn't. No, what she is doing is something so impossible and bizarre that it is actually changing the entire way that she perceives herself and her surroundings. The act of doing. An act so controversial and exhilarating that is has been classified as something best not done in sight of your loved ones.

What effect does this 'doing' have on the eventual heat death of the universe, the Turkish revival occurring a world away, or the steady rise of octopi as the dominant form on intelligent life? Nothing. It has no visible effect on anything other than one Edna Darling. Even then, she will quit after the third yoga session and go back to her normally routine life. But, that act of breaking the steady and repetitive march from birth to grave has allowed her to momentarily stand as the pinnacle of conscious life forms. 

It was for that brief second that Edna Darling became one of the most important objects in the universe with her bout of free will, and second only to the continuing existence of chili cheese fries in this particular dimension. For that brief second she became important. Most humans have one or two bouts of free will, and they hardly even recognize it. Some have many, and are considered either brilliant or insane (mostly both.) But choices are sitting there, just waiting for someone to take them in hand and run with them. To be, even for a brief second, important.

Fears and Such

I'm a worrier. I worry about things when I don't have something to think about. I worry about people's reactions to me, I worry about my grades, I worry about not worrying about my grades, I worry about eating too much, I worry about not eating enough, and I especially worry about things that are far beyond my control. These general worries make me a mess when I'm left to my own devices. This is why I never stop working on things. I either have to be reading or writing, planning or building, cleaning or messing up. If I ever stop moving, I get an unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach. These things stretch over to almost everything I do, and sometimes I just want to admit what silliness I tend to worry about:

• If I do not do the dishes, they might rebel after gaining their independence.
• (If I do the dishes too often they will become overworked, lethargic, and generally useless.)

• If I don't do well in school, I won't graduate and everyone I know will pity me and hate me.
• (Doing too well means that people tend to think I'm intelligent.)

• Reading outside might draw the ire of the local Rocs that will swoop down and carry me away before I can write my last will and testament.
• (Reading inside will anger the Gnomes.)

• Local law enforcement confiscating my computer after learning about the stash of highly valuable Very Large Primes located on my external hard drive.
• (Actually having them requires figuring out how to generate them using a Raspberry Pi.)

• The God of Stoplights (an ancient deity long forgotten and re-situated during the 1930's New Gods Act in response to the rise of technology in the new world) might cancel our agreement about yellow lights.
• (Also that I might remember what I signed away in that agreement.)

• Thursday might actually be Friday at one point, and that we only have 6 days in the week from now on.
• (Not to mention the implications on the length of the year and the extreme haste to the heat death of the universe.)

• That perhaps one day there will be no more potato chips.
• (And no twice baked potatoes either...)

• Japanese Giant Hornets. 

There. Those are the things that I worry about on a constant basis. Trust me, it's a terrible existence that you want no part of. Also, rocs are a protected species in Michigan. Who would have guessed?

Like Fireflies in Overdrive

It's been an emotionally charged week for me. Lot of roommate troubles and people not knowing what it means to have your name on something. But to prevent an entire post about whining: the lights are back on. No matter what emotional filth I had to deal with or philosophical discussions I had to get into with my labmates (talk of the formation of a guild of hit men was brought up, but I had to quell the idea,) the lights ARE back on.

Everything in the end will get better. No matter what tabs need to be paid, who needs to be picked up off the floor, and how many times "Yes, we have to go, the bar closes at two." needs to be said, everyone gets home at the end of the night (usually.) Sometimes you end up sleeping on life's metaphorical couch (or her real one) and sometimes life needs to be dragged into the taxi cab and you need to fumblingly ask her address again. In the end, through all the mud and swill of life's bar crawl and the pain of the next morning, we're still alive and still able to take on what ever else comes our way.

On the bright side, the freezer is defrosted.