Maundy Thursday!!
“Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.” - Charles Bukowski

There is this sense of restlessness within me, a kind of pent-up ball of energy that I cannot expend because I'm afraid of what will happen if I do use it. It's the feeling you get just before you start a race, or the pause on your bicycle before a steep slope. A kind of thrilling anticipation, and when you do swing your legs and your arms, when you lift your feet up and fly down the hill with the wind in your face, for that moment you're unstoppable and impossible.

But the thing is that, I don't want to feel this ball of nervous energy. I want to be calm and placid. Like a lake on a hot summer's day, and the cool water lapping the shore.

There was a Friday when I stumbled out of my last class for the day feeling so unsettled and bored with life. The same old arguments were being recycled for literature, and it made me so mad that there wasn't anything new or exciting to be had. And I just wanted to get away from everything, from the bored cynicism of academia, and find that wonder it used to be so easy to find. I ended up whining dreadfully, all the while feeling my face start to oil from the heat, and just utter discontentment. I read a book, and one character said to the other, shaking his head, "you have no stillness inside you."

Anyway, turns out that dinner with Sheryl did the trick. So thank you for that! There's something immensely comforting about friendship and I'm just super grateful for someone who understands ha.

In other news, I've been trying to alleviate the boredom by not thinking about it. This isn't working out, but in the meantime, I've really progressed in reading books not meant for school. I've started reading Fight Club, and the characters are so screwed up. I told my sister this and she asked me "then why are you reading it?" The question completely took me by surprise. So tempted to shrug and say "why does anyone do anything?" But instead, I told her I wanted to understand why it was a cult favourite. My curiosity dooms me.

But that wasn't the whole truth. It scare me how easily half-truths come to my mouth so easily nowadays. It's not that I intend to lie, but that it's easier to not have to explain things that my mouth finds next to impossible to be coherent about. So I end up nodding my head and going "urh okay, yeah, that's it" when someone suggests an answer that doesn't fully hit the nail on the head.

So Fight Club. Everybody's mad and anarchic. They do want to watch the world burn. They want to shock and jolt the lives of the man on the street to help him feel pain and therefore alive. It's when you're so close to death that you feel most alive I think. Our unnamed protagonist says, "At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves." Do I dare, and do I dare? As Eliot says, "Shall I part my hair behind, do I dare to eat a peach?" Our whole lives consist of tiny moments of decision and indecision and every choice we make hurtles us unerringly towards the future, and death of course. (Lest we forget the most inescapable of inescapables).

And at this point in my life, filled with the vastness of discontent, I am learning about having to make decisions about who I am and what I want to be. I am learning that decisions are difficult finicky things that I cannot avoid. That I cannot remain forever in an oasis of calm like that cool lake, but sooner or later, I'll have to break out of my aimless drifting, lift my feet up to the pedals and cycle for all its worth.