entry, part II

I totally meant to finish that entry last night. But I think something happened along the lines of me nearly collapsing at the keyboard.

I was just thinking to myself, what should I listen to while I blog tonight? So I looked through my playlists and realized they were all way too predictable. Thus I've made a playlist entitled "I'm Sick of Predictable Playlists." It's chock full of goodies that I don't listen to all the time, formulated via the ultra-scientific method of scrolling around my library and picking something random from each screen.

But if I had fears of the random pick sucking, I'd definitely pick something a few songs up or down, that sounded a little more promising. Yeah, I'm fickle. But yeah, I designed the experiment myself. So they're my rules to break.

It'd figure, though, I'd go through the trouble to pick out some relatively less traditional blogging music, and have nothing to blog about. Well, maybe something.

So, in writing a story, there are only a finite number of conflicts any given character can run into. I remember only really touching on four in school, even though Wikipedia says there are eight or so. Right now, my conflict is Man vs. Himself.

But to be kind, I'll summarize, as this is just a variation on a theme lately: I need college to get where I need to go in life, but I hate sitting through classes. I'm smart and can accomplish anything I want to, given sufficient incentive. But, my track record is as follows: I mess up every chance that falls in my lap, and the ones I seek out always turn out to be nowhere near as satisfying as I'd hoped. So, through significant fault of my own, plus some genuinely unfortunate outward circumstances, nothing's really worked out the way it was supposed to.

I asked my mom tonight if all people do in life is work towards some promise of an eventual payoff. And that thought scares me more than anything. If I go through with college, get a degree in something, get a job, get a house, get a dog, get married, have kids, then pay for their college? Seems like once people satisfy the demands they once strived to meet, they go looking for bigger prizes and bigger challenges.

I'm wondering, at what point does one stop and take some time to enjoy those hard-earned things? Does such a point exist? And if life truly is all about the endless pursuit of increasingly lofty goals, how the hell can that be satisfying at all?

I personally don't feel like spending every day of my life preparing to have a better one. I'd like to reach a point where I'm done with that, and I can be happy. And I hope my view of American life, and my view of my own life and future, well... I hope they're just overly cynical, and wrong. There's nothing I'd like more than to be told I'm making absolutely no sense at all, and that the drive to improve oneself (or acquire toys, for some people) does really hold some sort of beauty and exhilaration which I haven't yet figured out. Somebody, please, give me some hope!

And on the more short-term end of the spectrum, I wouldn't be opposed to trees genetically engineered to reproduce without pollen. I'd much rather avert my eyes from oaks humping each other than have such a runny nose that I'd sell my soul to be able to sneeze uncontrollably.

And now, for your moment of Zen, thanks to wired.com: uh, wow. and it's like a nightmare.

Goodnight.

(DB) out.