Jazz

Jazz for me is like water. It trickles into the ears, facilitating thought.

In my caffeine-addled brain, it makes me think of humanity and the human condition. Why do we fight reality with such vigor? The facts are there but we interpret them in hundreds of different ways and many times, it's just one or another. There could be subtext, regardless of whether or not it was meant to have any subtext. All these facets exist, yet we choose to take one angle of it.

If you take a cone and slice it vertically, the cross-section will be a triangle. If you slice it horizontally, it'll be a circle. Reality is dynamic and contains more than just two slices, yet we choose to look at it in one, two maybe three ways, but that's it. We shape reality based on these angles and forget or disregard others because it doesn't fit into the equation.

That's why we have eras and then the following era overturns that very thinking. We are in the era of irony and cynicism and what comes from that? Hope and a yearning for the pure, the innocence of the past. We are the generation that clings to the past, thinking that it was somehow better than now, when all it is, is reality hitting us in the face. It's always been there, we've just never seen it.

From a generation that's seen the subversion of authority, of violence and hatred rises a generation that acknowledges the hope and the goodness in people. Random acts of kindness come from that.

I think New York has got it right in many ways. It's viewed as somewhat of a sad existence, but the initial guardedness, yet the helpfulness (that is given as if it's an obvious thing to do) of its denizens is the active acceptance of reality for what it is. There are millions of different people out there, thinking millions of derivations of the same thoughts and we try to only accept what we agree with. New Yorkers (for the most part) see it, condemn what they condemn and accept what they accept. Of course I'm over-generalizing but I feel that this is a kind of truth that I've gleaned from the whopping 11 months I lived there.

Anyway, too much caffeine and too many papers to write make me think of such things.

Sleep Deprivation

After a certain point, my brain stops working.

Any sort of good judgement is absent from my reasoning. "Oh, I have two finals tomorrow?  Let's play Tetris Battle for an hour."

Yet I persist.

Now it's 4am and I have yet to find my quotes for my paper tomorrow.

Maybe I should just give up and go to sleep. Hm.

AH! But this is the last final!

But I feel like I will be okay.

Oh well, I'll continue to work on my paper that was due a week ago. -_-;;

*tsssss* (my brain is fried)

One more day.

To think or to live?

My sister mentioned this and I think there's validity in what she's saying - in that I think too much about things. It's true - there are a lot of implications in our actions and I think that by trying to act deliberately in all that I do, I end up being unable to act at all.

Perhaps that's why I hate tedium so much. It bores the hell out of me too, but perhaps it's because I try to overthink something that is a lot simpler than I make it to be.

As for thinking and living - I feel that it's one or the other. In doing an action, one must not think of the action they are doing (try to think about where your feet are going when you go down steps... you'll feel like you're going to fall - at least more than when you don't think about how your feet are walking down those steps...). Then conversely, when thinking, it becomes more difficult to act because one is busy thinking about the action that is about to take place or an action that took place. Then how do we find a happy medium?

Eh. I dunno, I have issues with this but I hope that I find an answer because it's making me ridiculously unproductive. -_-;;

Oh the incessant rhythms of time, why must you beat on so

Yes, I'm being overly dramatic. It's kind of fun when it's meant ironically. It makes me think of the following picture:

I do feel like the child but it doesn't take away from the fact that it's painful.

Deadlines shouldn't represent a bondage to time but in my inability to keep them, I become a slave to the very thing I'm trying to escape.

I'm pretty sure I talked about it before so it's kind of boring but every single time the reality of it hits me again, it's another slap in the face and I remind myself again, that next time, I won't procrastinate, that it won't happen again.

Yet it does. *sigh*~ Oh, when will I ever learn? Such revelations hopefully lead to some kind of self-realization and then to some kind of change, right?

The important thing is progress and I think I've made some progress. Thankfully I'm making these stupid mistakes at a community college, rather than in grad school, where my grades and overall success matter a little more.

What I'm excited for during break is not the fact that I'll be free from all this work, but that I'll be able to slow down and enjoy the works that I couldn't give the proper time of day during my studies. I think I've found my niche. :)