meeting standards
January 24, 2004 @ 10:57 p.m.
I am very unhappy tonight.
I have been thinking about school, and how much there is for me to do this semester. Fifteen hours probably doesn't seem like much to the regular student, but it is much to me. Especially when I work twenty hours a week and commute to and from work ten hours a week. I am already stressed about school and it is only the end of the second week. There are presentations that I have to do -- one of them fifteen minutes, one of them twenty, one of them a full class period. There's constant readings that I have to keep up with.
And then there's dealing with the weather, and with my family, and my car not behaving itself, and money stresses, and roommates and friends
- and suddenly I am feeling very upset and very weak and I feel rather that I want a long extended cuddly hug from a boy who's 900 miles west of here.
I suddenly want nothing to do with school -- it is though I am already finished, as though my mind has already decided I am done with it, that I am bored and so I am pushing it aside in lieu of something that might hold my attention. And my mother's wrong, I was never that focused on schoolwork (and am just now starting to turn away). I was always ambivalent about it. I was forced into college and anything I am forced into, I do not attend to well.
I have dawdled my best this weekend, not necessarily on purpose but more out of the need to not face things. I never get a break, you see. If it's not school, it's work, and if it's not work, it's school. It's sixteen weeks -- it's four months -- of constant. And constant, after a while, makes me dizzy. I am not a strong person. I break very easily...or more realistically, I tune out, become bored. I build walls and push projects into "good enough" modes so that I can pass but not be outstanding.
I watched on television -- I think it was 20/20 -- that purposeful work and giving back to others was what makes people the most happy. Even at that moment I had turned to my mother and said, "No wonder I'm so unhappy. My job has no real purpose and I don't give anything back to anyone." And it's true. There's no service work being done by me, and no purposeful work. School doesn't feel purposeful anymore -- it feels like politics and a sheet of paper at the end proclaiming my school loans to anyone who can read between the graduating lines.
I don't want much out of this life, I honestly don't. I want a car that behaves itself and is good enough to take on random road trips without worrying it will make it there and back. I want an apartment, alone or with someone, that is neat but not necessarily clean. I want a job that I can get some sort of satisfaction from but leave at the workplace. I want meaningful relationships with my family and my friends. I want to have sex, with or without emotion involved. I want to be able to have some financial comfort in the world, but still have to balance my checkbook. I want to have family potlucks and have to roll my eyes and force myself to go to them. I want a comfortable bed with comfortable sheets and I want to get many good night sleeps. I want to drink good water and good alcohol. I want to laugh. I want to cry too, but I want to laugh more often than I cry, and harder too. I want to care less what people think, and I want to read books about everything. I want to be comfortable in my agnosticism.
So it's maybe more than what some people expect from life. I should probably condense it -- but actually, no. I shouldn't. That is what I want from life and why shouldn't I have it?
All of this will pass, I know it. Come tomorrow, after sleep, I will be pacified again. But for the moment, I am rather frustrated with my life. It is simply not meeting standards, and I am disgusted with it. I have to deal with it for now, I recognize that. But that does not mean I will do so quietly.
And unfortunately, dear readers, that means you get the brunt of it.
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- - March 22, 2010
always the same - July 01, 2008
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I don't like you, but I love you - October 03, 2006