| i am drowning. |
[Nov. 17th, 2009|02:01 pm] |
today moves too slow and without reason.
today it feels like i might not survive.
i want to find a vibe that i can rest in while moving; like this, my life is full of inconsistent hypocricies and contradictions. i am fighting. and i am fighting a battle. and i am fighting a battle that i will probably lose.
soon i will be 23. and soon i will be free from the tyranny of higher education. i try to imagine where this might take me, as if to some other destination. another future? it's not on it's way.
my destiny is mine and mine alone, right? but then why do so many of my peers know and feel as if they don't know what they are doing? we're not set. the impulsive need to delineate has been conditioned in us since kindergarten. they ask you, 5 years old and curly red pigtails, "what do you want to be when you grow up?"
i wanted to be.. everything. i wanted to be all of it and nothing. i wanted to be the connection between the boundaries. i grew up being other people all of the time and somehow this made me myself. that identity osmosis never got straight through to my core because while i am all recycled pieces, peopel still see me and recognize a separate entity.
i am a glass sponge. absorbtion is a necessity, if not an unavoidable trait.
as a sponge, i reject sudsy dissilution. maybe that's what i got good at.
and then, in 8th grade, 6 years and almost a whole new person later, they ask you, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" as if this question can direct your education a tthis point, allowing you some formidable control over where you are going. we are all going to the same place, every day, and they teach us our histories and they teach us our graces and they don't provide heroes for the working class here. years and years. and the teachers feel like they've got a hand in where all this is going. they go home, underpaid and overworked (unless you taught at a school on the nice side of the city), and think, "well, i'm doing good, at least. i'm helping educate our future." and what they don't realize is they're just regurgitating all the same shit that conditions us for the hegemon. why don't they teach us the real things?
blue hair was the first time i realized i could live outside of the normal social system. i tried to be cool for like two weeks in my entire life, and once i realized how those kids treated each other, i started smoking pot and wearing black. still a part of a system, but an outside one at the very least. i was 12. or 13. and once i started thinking for myself, i realized that there was music out there that didn't sell on the radio. i learned what selling out meant, and i learned about the underground. and so i met new people because the music i liked you could only listen to at local shows. and then, they would feed me beer and they'd teach me about anarchy. i got it but i didn't get it. I didn't understand the full scope of the capitalist system until i actually felt oppressed by it. until i dug into the details. and now i can't unlearn.
again, in high school, it got a little closer to finding that niche. some of us play sports. some of us do calculus. some of us write.
but then they taught us about economics, and they taught us more about U.S. history (i don't know anything) and they kept us in line and outlawed any expression of religion, identity or self that wasn't socially acceptable. i wrote letters to the editor condemning our principle.
this was a point in time when careers, and not jobs, still seemed plausible, and we were taught that bootstrap theory is flawless. that the United States, despite invading Iraq at this time, was still on top of the world. The mighty dollar kept us safe. That to make money is be comfortable. and that to live in this world, being a part of the system is still necessary. I was still taught that you could take it down from the inside.
So when i found my niche i buried myself in it.
until i expressed that something about my college education was taking something away from me. is this why it's so intense? are they grinding me down, layer by layer, until the nerve is exposed and they can control me? journalism is dying. in a very weird way. i can't make money doing this. but the pursuit of truth will set us free.
is that what i am willing to stand by, despite the massive concentration of unstoppable corporate hegemonic media? a failed and laid off cartoonist at the late rocky mountain news told me i didn't have a choice: everyone sells out someday.
is this why i feel like i'm suffering so much in a sea of fucking affluence?
in french, they have a word: cher. it means rich, expensive. they also have a phrase: faire chier. it means to take a shit.
as i come upon the end of this semester, almost six months away from my final graduation into the "real" world, i wonder. what do i want to be when i grow up? do i have a choice? in this system, i could very well be swept along with the thousands--no, millions of those who take that first step into the false flourescent light of office buildings and paper trails. swept along with the stream.
but as i become more and more aware of the current, being swept along becomes no longer an option. |
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rawteeth's journal
'd diary.