Inertia

When people ask the "if you could only have/do/watch _____ for the rest of your life, what would it be?" I can't give them an answer. It's illogical to answer something like that. No one can conceive a lifetime of something. One image, one taste, one possession, one action...everything is temporary. The rest of my life is hopefully a long time. Sometimes, I feel awed by how little I have planned for it.

If I could be one place for as long as I wanted--without interruption, without major change, completely stable and constant--it would be in a cabin on a mountain in Maine or New Hampshire. I would have pets with me: a cat, a dog, maybe a bird or a snake if I really wanted one. But I would be alone. No other people. No one to talk to, no one within hearing range, no one for miles. How weird is that? Most people crave social interaction. I love to be with people, but at the end of the day, I need to be alone inside my head. And if my head was as beautiful as the White Mountains are--winter or summer--I'm not sure how long I would stay there before I missed people. Maybe days. Maybe weeks. Maybe as long as it took me to get bored. Because no matter how beautiful o wonderful or special something is, it can't be stunning forever. Familiarity doesn't always breed contempt; if you're not careful, it will breed apathy.

School starts the day after tomorrow. I'm looking forward to seeing teachers, trying out new classes, mentoring the freshies. But past that...god, I don't know. The same little aches and pains every day, from people and work and those moments where I think about everything that I hate thinking about. School forces me to do things. It's a fact of life. Doesn't mean I have to like it.

God, I could probably enjoy the whole fucking thing if I put my mind to it. Let the snubs and the dislike roll off my back. Fill my head with the things that make me happy, to hell with the rest of it. But I can't. I can work my ass off and only talk to the people I want to and just cruise along, but it'll all come back to what happens in my head. And I can't cruise through any of that.

I hope. I hope I hope I hope. I hope that I won't spend the rest of my life doing things I hate because they'll put me on par with all the overachievers around me. Please, God or whoever's up there, I don't want to spend my life in a cubicle or behind a register, becoming bitter and angry because I couldn't succeed at what I loved. Please please please. I'll do anything and everything to not let that happen. I want to go to college and find out what I want to do with my life. I want to have some fucking direction, and I don't want it to come from trying to do everything everyone else is doing. I'm not my friends. I'm me. And if I waste my life, I'll never forgive myself.

And now for an 360 in subject change:

Unlike most people, I do not have shoulder-angels and shoulder-devils. I have a shoulder-Harpo Marx, a shoulder-Tom Collins, and a shoulder-Hamlet. The Harpo is the childish, comic, carefree, sneaky part of me. The Collins is the laid-back, chill, deep-thinking, philosophical, living-my-friends part of me. The Hamlet is the angsty, whiny, aggressive, sensitive, lamenting part of me. I also have Douglas Adams and Edna St. Vincent Millay, but they're not on my shoulder. They hide in my hair and never bother anyone, except when I want them to.