Sine qua non

First, some thoughts on the movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine. No, I'm not going to actually talk about the movie, but there was a scene in particular that got me thinking. This isn't going to be much of a spoiler, but if you absolutely want to know nothing about the movie before going into it...tough.

After making his escape from the evil, manipulative government organization, Logan stays the night with an elderly couple at their rural home. During his entire time there, the couple call Logan "son", an innocuous acknowledgment of his status as their junior. The first few times they do this, the audience doesn't blink - obviously they're the elderly couple and he's the strapping, misguided youth out for revenge. And yet we are then given a scene at the dinner table where Logan mentions that his favorite make of motorcycle is a 1948 something or another, and the old man exclaims that Logan was extremely young to know or appreciate such an old motorcycle. Obviously, Logan seems to be a relatively young man, but as he blushes from across the table at the man's comment, suddenly we remember that Logan was more than a century old in 1948. In all likelihood, Logan is several times the old man's age. How strange that the other man still played the role of the old, fatherly sage to Logan's brooding youth when in actuality it would seem more likely for Logan to be sharing his more than a century's worth of life lessons to the old man. But no, the traditional roles are maintained, and never again in the movie are we reminded of his age. Instead he simply falls into the role of the hero with a troubled past, without the length or significance of that past playing any apparent role in his life as we are given to see on screen. Shouldn't he be wiser than we see him? After more than a hundred years of life, shouldn't he be acting less like a testosterone junkie and more like the kind old man who took him in and chided his lack of perspective on the tragedy that had befallen him?

I suppose action heroes can't be too worldly and wise or it wouldn't be a good action flick, but it raised a question.

This is my question: What would growing old be like if you never aged? What effect does physical aging have on the psyche, on one's conception of themselves? Is our confrontation of our mortality necessary for growth, or is simply garnering life experience enough to make us wise?

I suppose this is another indication of my concern for my own mortality. I want to do more with my limited time in this life, but I feel woefully ignorant of what I want out of life. I feel like I've elevated the importance of every moment to such a level that perhaps I only stand to be disappointed. Or maybe I really do need to completely change the life I've been living. Perhaps, like everything else, it's neither one nor the other but both, and likely many other things as well.

I had an idea a couple nights ago: within three years of leaving school, I want to pack up and move with whoever will go with me to another city somewhere else in the world. While there, we would support ourselves by whatever means we could find, learn the language, and really attempt to make that place home for however long we stayed. Like coming to New York for school, living in these different places would hopefully provide different perspectives on life, and at least remind us of the vastness of possible experiences. I hope very much that my friends come with me, but as long as I am able, I think I will do this by myself if I have to. And maybe I do have to.

I wonder how I will feel after going to those places, and when I will want to settle down. I wonder what, and who, I would miss and perhaps be unable to do without, even if I were to live forever.

I think the Jedi were wise to caution against emotional attachments. Pain leads to anger, etc, and nothing stings quite like emotional attachments...

A Disquiet Follows My Soul

So here I am again, sitting in front of my computer in a dark room, listening to heart-wrenching music played loudly over my speakers. I could hardly put two thoughts together on my way back from class, all I could think of was getting home to this dark room. There was a kind of desperation there, seemingly without a cause, and I've found myself here again. Why do I keep running back here?

I think I'm happy, and I think I even know what that means. I'm proud to say that I think I'm giving life a fair shake and keeping my eyes open to what's out there. But what if that's all true, and I still don't like what I see?

It would be easy to believe that I could take some pills and feel better. I've even toyed with the idea of getting a prescription for anti-depressants, and yet I can't see myself talking to a psychiatrist. I would want the pills to feel better but I wouldn't feel the need to acknowledge a problem. Honestly, I don't think I have a problem. Things that make me happy still make me as happy as they ever have, maybe even more so for the contrast. And yet the interim seems so much more gray.

I am troubled by the uncertainties, but more and more I realize how necessary they are. I think that's why I keep coming back here, why I keep sitting back in this chair, listening to sad music in a dark room. When I listen to this music, I feel like I'm tapped into another world. It's always there, I think, but people are too busy going in one direction or another to notice it until something forces them to stop. This world is a world of stillness and ambivalence. Here there is only the feeling. I feel like there's a clarity in this feeling, but the vision given to me is one of certain uncertainty. So many people are certain of things, and move confidently down the path they've chosen for themselves, but when I listen to this music, I don't feel the need to move anywhere. It's like a vantage point from which I can look out at my life. And I don't think it's from a point of sadness - that's not really what I feel. It's a feeling of...profundity.

How interesting that sad music is described as beautiful, but your favorite upbeat pop song probably wouldn't be.

There's a hunger for this feeling within me, a hunger that's been growing more and more lately. In fact these days I rarely listen to anything else if I don't have occasion to. Sure it's one thing to listen to upbeat music while walking to class or working out at the gym, but if I'm sitting at my computer, there's likely only one thing playing. I guess if you're going somewhere, doing something, you need music that will take you there. It's extroverted. But much like everything else I do, this music helps me face inward.

Is this because I don't want to see what's around me? I could believe that. I don't much want to see the people here, and I've grown tired of the same games they play every weekend, looking for entertainment. Wasting precious time.

Maybe I just miss my friends, and my home. I'd like to go home.

The Thaw, part 1

I am getting older. I am questioning everything. Some things have been confirmed, and those foundations shall be given more care and attention. Other things have been, or may yet be, discarded. The aspects of my life that I have chosen to change, the things that I have let go of, felt like a weight I was obliged to carry on my shoulders, and when I could go no further and had to put down my burden, I found no one and nothing telling me to pick it back up. I was startled at my own freedom. I have since become more wary of my obligations, and just as my sensitivity to undeserved expectations has become more acute recently, so has my awareness of the people and ideas in my life that really matter to me, and might have been receiving only lip service for too long.

I think even more than getting older, I am growing. I mentioned earlier in this blog that sometimes it is best for people to grow out of relationships, and that wishing things were otherwise is not healthy for anyone, but at that time I was perhaps too hasty in my assessment of those closest to me. I might be making the same mistake now, but I know the change is coming, and I recognize now as then that it will happen one way or the other.

I have this image attached to the notion of growth. I suppose I could best describe it as streamlining. That which is most central to who I am has been reaffirmed and strengthened, and even aspects of myself that I had once cherished and had recently forgotten have been uncovered again by this process. Some new elements have been incorporated too, but they seem to share the spirit of what has always mattered to me, and represent a growth out of those ideas.

I hope the following will be somewhat of a disambiguation of the preceding:

Winter break was the catalyst for all this change.

I had developed a rut since I'd been at Columbia, but by the first semester of Junior year, and maybe even the preceding summer, I knew it. I am still struggling with my reasons for being here, and I have been considering many questions the answers to which may illuminate my situation and my path in the future:

What is an academic? Am I one? Is that the same thing as being a student? Am I even a "student" anymore?

Should I be looking around for my career here in college? Is that realistic? Should I be studying my interests or some hybrid of my interests and pragmatic, marketable skills?

If I don't get a job in the field of my major, what will the point of going to college have been?

I don't know the answers to many of these questions. Some part of me gets the sense that I could never be an academic. No part of me wants to enrich human understanding as a whole. It would seem that I am after more personal answers, answers on an individual level. It could be that I'll find those answers by looking outward, but lately I find it hard to find a great deal of affinity for humanity as a whole. These days, it's draining enough to care about me and mine, and I have enough questions for myself without trying to figure the world out. And the problem is that whatever atrocities I may be ignoring, whatever social ills I should be out combating, I see humanity's hand behind them all. There is some idealism left in me, and I know that the ignorance I abhor is sometimes simply a lack of education, a lack of civilization and reverence for thought. We owe it to a great many people to cultivate a human culture of compassion based on reason and respect for our shared human condition.

Maybe people fight because they don't realize how doomed we all are anyways. Maybe if they really believed that all of us only had one life and realized how short it was, people could be more peaceful. It breaks my heart to think of how many things I wish I could hold on to forever, but will eventually pass away from me. Too many people think themselves immortal.

Anyways, I think I got sidetracked somewhere.

You know, I thought this would be an easy blog post. I've been through perhaps the most emotionally tiring couple weeks of my life, and I can't even be poetical and eloquent about it. I was messed up last semester, so much so that even a relatively easy workload felt like a grind. I felt out of touch with pretty much everything, only to come home and find no relief and unlooked for questions about people and things I had always counted on. I think I started losing my mind. And only after that came the most painful emotional blow I've ever experienced. What was meant to be an "intervention" for me, with my friends expressing their concern over my increasingly withdrawn demeanor, resulted in my roommate telling me that in the wake of his father's death last semester, he needed me more than anyone else in the world, but that I wasn't there for him. Ostensibly, he said all of this to tell me how obviously absent I was, but this seemed like something he wanted to confront me about with regard to our relationship. I'm not sure how much my other friends knew about how this supposed intervention was going to turn out, but I hope they didn't know he was going to do that.

I have never felt so guilty, so embarrassed, or so angry. I hope I never will again.

It was clear to me that our relationship was one thing in his mind, and something entirely different in mine. He had made me into something that I was not willing to be to him, and he wanted me to act in a way that I was not willing to act. And so he became disillusioned and hurt at my apparent failure to act the part of his friend. He had made what should have been a discussion between the two of us, taking place months beforehand, into a guilt trip aimed right at me and abetted by my closest friends.

I have many more thoughts on this that I will not share. Things between us now are not good, and most interestingly, I don't really care.

But the most remarkable thing happened after all that, and I felt better than I had in weeks.

I'll tell you all about it later.

Sad, sad, sad, all the time.

While grasping around for ideas for today's post, I realized that I usually listen to very melancholy music while I write. Actually, when my mood doesn't usually present a more suitable choice, I usually default to music that's on the softer, sadder side. I sincerely hope it's not because I'm some emo child that craves sympathy on some deep level...and I don't think that's the case despite the inevitably emo flavor of my next sentence. I think I listen to sad music because it draws me inward to myself, whereas upbeat music tends to make me more aware of my surroundings and what I'm doing. It's weird to think that I feel closest to my own thoughts when I'm listening to somber music, but I guess it could just be a result of my introspective personality rather than an indication that I'm a particularly melancholy person.

More later.