Existential Quandary CXIX

After thirty five years of life I think that the events of Friday may have convinced me that I'm doing it all wrong.

See, for my entire life I've lived pretty abstemiously. I don't drink; I don't smoke; I don't eat to excess (well, not lately); I don't sleep around (hell, I turn an amusing color of crimson just talking to women even today) and I spend my free time doing things like brushing up on useless mathematical skills and reading novels that nobody else I've ever known bothers to read (at least when they had the choice to read anything else).

If you look back in the history of this blog you'll see all sorts of half-ass explanations for this pointless self-flagellation. I wanted to learn Latin, I argued, because I just enjoyed the learning process and Latin was handy. To read all the classics, I crooned, to know the human spirit and psyche in all its variety. Modern novels, I sagely noted, would be jumping off points for discussions with others who might have also read them.

Well, that's all a bunch of bullshit. Sure, learn Latin if you want to carry about a panoply of new words but be damned if anyone else is going to understand what the hell you're saying. And certainly, read the classic novels of yesteryear to get to know how people acted and felt 200 years ago; disregard the fact that you can get the same information from having a 10-minute conversation with any wino on the street. And let me tell you, I've had exactly 0 conversations spawned because of some modern novel I read.

No, as usual with most of the things I look back on this is a bunch of crap contrived to hide a key problem. See, by 'not fitting in' with others, by altering my realm of experience to exclude television and most other popular pastimes I justify my own cowardice towards other people. I don't have to approach anyone at work and have a non-work conversation, for example, because, well, they're obviously not interested in the same things as I am and so won't want to talk to me anyway. I subconsciously exclude myself from common human experience and then hide behind that difference because at heart I'm a chickenshit when it comes to people. What's even more amusing is that at the exact same time I woefully observe that I don't have enough contact with people and that I'm about to go insane because of it. So I simultaneously create and lament my own problem.

I propose that my great labor of self should be to strive in all things to act the true sensualist, to live by the creed that there is no greater good than the happiness of others and self. To do always that which feels right and best and yet still respects the feelings of others. For 35 years I have trodden the road of the frightened child, trying desperately to take up as little space in the lives of others as possible, always following my father's oft-repeated motto of childhood: "Children are to be seen and not heard." At 35, I may qualify as no longer a child, I think and perhaps it is time for me to be heard.