Existential Ennui

~ Searching for Meaning Amid the Chaos

Existential Ennui

Tag Archives: crap I didn’t learn

I Think Therefore I Suffer

26 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by Sherry in Humor, Life in the Foothills

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

crap I didn't learn, crap I learned, life in the foothills, lifestyle, musings

devolutionI find the human condition dizzyingly complex. I’m not sure we’ll ever get it sorted out. I’m reasonable sure that you have to be slightly off (if you get my drift) to study the human mind, and I’m very sure that prolonged study causes intense breaks with reality meaning that research results become suspect the minute they are conceived.

I mean, I am one of your more ordinary types of “scheduled” persons. I do a whole host of things as part of a routine that can become quite rigid. I walk the dog at 6 a.m. If the weather does not cooperate, but it’s sunny and lovely at 9 a.m., well too bad dog, that window has closed until tomorrow.

If you have ever read a story whose main character is one of those routinized humans who eats the same lunch for twenty-five years while sitting on the same park bench across the street from their work location which is a tiny cubicle in a corner from which said subject does some routine mundane same-old-same-old day in and day out for forty-three glorious years returning home at precisely 5:47 p.m. to one of five carefully arranged TV dinners and then two hours of knitting before climbing into bed at the stroke of 10 p.m. to awaken precisely at 6 a.m. to do it all over again, and equate me as one of those persons, well, you would be mistaken.

You would be deeply mistaken.

I revel in setting up systems of order, but true order is nothing but neurotic obsession. I like knowing that there is a time for every purpose under heaven, but find it serves me best by allowing me to ignore the chores I wish to ignore if fate delivers me some altered time line. You see, I use order for the gifts of avoidance as much a for the gift of organization.

I never met a routine that couldn’t be tweeked.

I never met one that didn’t need major revisions at least twice a year.

Because my desire for orderly organization runs smack into my desire for something new.

It is why I struggle to have “a” hobby, rather than eight or so.

It is why I struggle to add yet another great recipe rather the fine grouping that I already have of tested and true.

It is why I sit puzzling for sometimes day as to “what to read next” because there is so much to choose from.

It is why new thoughts intrigue me rather than bore or frustrate me. Dazzle me with your ideas for my brain loves the challenge.

Why am I not satisfied with a job well done, repetitively? Why am I on this unrelenting quest to master yet another THING?

Who knows.

It may be part of what makes us human, or at least most of us? More than some of us at least, for I live by the theory that I am only original in my sum rather than my parts.

We are driven to conquer new things, we humans. It is what has taken us to the moon, Mars and beyond, which powers us to the Mariana Trench and to the North Pole. From this thing inside, we decided we should be able to fly like birds, and go faster than horses at a full gallop. It propels us ever onward, never satisfied with what is but rather focused on what might be.

I am not Einstein, nor Picasso; no Sophocles am I, no Hypatia, Gertrude Stein, or Curie. The drive to do something new is not limited to only the brightest and most noteworthy inventor or sophist  but resides somewhere beside that reptilian remnant in each braincase.

There is percolates a constant insistent demand or remains dormant throughout most of its life, or somewhere in between. What awakens it, or dampens it, whatever the case may be, is unknown to me for sure. It just surely is in me a sometimes annoying nagging that never ceases.

So I go along in my routines sometimes happily for weeks, until it’s just not enough, and I scrounge around seeking some new challenge. To read the book I’ve long avoided because it was too hard, to attempt a new hobby or take an old one up a notch. To master something new, to add to my resumé offered with the last breath to the only possibly interested entity who common sense (let alone great theologically pondering) tells me has no such interest.

Yet I am so compelled as are countless others, to do SOMETHING, to create, categorize, expand the realm of knowledge, point out the failings of planetary systems be they political or religious. We are all compelled to DO, for no very good reason at all. After all, I am by thinking said Réne. What more needs be said or done?

This is not something morose and melancholy. Whatever you believe about God and death, it accommodates all. What is is, what will be will be, and not much I do changes any of that. But still I do.  Do that is. And with a happy and challenged heart for the doing excites and exhilarates, giving satisfaction beyond the completion of the thing itself.

I should much like to ask a chimpanzee if they experience this sort of thing at all. Is it better not to? I sense not, but I know not either. Perhaps there is a peacefulness that comes from life being sorted out ahead of you and only to be followed with death’s appearance earlier if you slip off the path into the gaping jaws of someone higher up the food chain.

Anyway, I’m busily re-organizing and it’s all so exciting and thrilling to have new challenges. For me it’s biking instead of walking and cooking in a new way driven by a body who has said “enough of that” now nourish me properly. It fills the days with a new expectation, new roads to travel, new discoveries.

The Contrarian views this all from his perch. His “drive” is significantly subdued. He chuckles a lot at my fever pitch, supportive but in his own comical way. He loves this new biking craze I’m starting. “Oh, my, but ANOTHER thing you will grow to hate to do every day!” But as he says, you may hate it but you can be damned determined to do it anyhow.

I am a closet full of discarded crafts away from being the most productive person I know.

So how weird am I?

Really, you can tell me.

heroic_death_dog_mug

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With My Nose Pressed Up Against the Glass

23 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by Sherry in Crap I Didn't Learn, Essays, GOP, Humor, Sarah Palin, Satire, teabaggers, Ted Cruz

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

crap I didn't learn, GOP, Sarah Palin, teabaggers, teaparty, Ted Cruz

Baby-face-shockedSeriously, these people are just crazy.

Let me put it this way. If the rapture comes, Washington D.C. will never know. They won’t realize anything is wrong until they leave the halls of Congress and find the streets empty.

They ain’t gettin’ raptured. No way God would bring them up to the heavenly garden. Not with their penchant for stupid is as stupid does. And they be doin’ stupid most all the time now.

I can’t keep crying wolf, heck, it’s beyond that.

You just sit in fascination reading one account after another of people gone wild. The lunatics from gerrymandered red state districts tell us that their constituencies tell them to HOLD THE LINE. Even if that means that the country is destroyed? Wellllllllll, nobody ever thought past HOLD THE LINE!

It gets back to that old debate–as an elected representative, do you take a poll and vote the majority, or do you use you “independent” judgment under the theory that you know more than they do? It seems that they do pretty much both, whichever is convenient at the moment. Vote against a Syrian military action because the “folks back home are unilaterally against it.” Vote against background checks for weapon buyers because “hey, that’s my source of campaign funds” and the folks really don’t get all the fine points that I’m privy to.

To hear them tell it, Republicans in Congress hate Ted Cruz. Hate him. Think he’s a total jerk. Yet he seems to be running the show, as the country slides into the turlit. Unless it doesn’t. Like I said, crying wolf is getting old, and people are starting to yawn and ignore the entire bunch of clowns.

Until.

Until the shit hits the fan. I’m not sure what shit will hit what fans, but I bet it will.

I started reading a book about a guy who teaches math at the college level. He started reading about creationists and got intrigued and went to a homeschooling convention. It became a hobby of sorts and has written a book of his experiences with these strange folk. An example will suffice:

A speaker was giving all the rip-roaring good reasons why it was important to home school and keep the kiddies from learning about all the evil out in the real world in the form of evolution, that atheistical concocted nonsense, and homosexuality which is the devil’s joy. During the question and answer, our writer asks,

“Given that eventually your children will be going out into that world, do you ever think that it might be better to let them experience it now when they are young, and you still have some control over them, and can guide them along, rather than them getting all the worldly stuff when they leave home and you have no such control?”

The answer?

“NO! Next question.”

I mean these folks are dogmatic, and unable and unwilling to even consider alternatives to their own very weirdly structured world view.

That seems about where we are when it comes to the Tea Birchers. They have mind blocks that prevent them from even hearing the question let alone considering any alternative. If the Black guy is for it, I’m against it! Heck, I’m against it if he is neutral, that’s just a trick! The black ops are coming any day, Lord let me just get to the gun store in time to buy another Beretta, or Tank, whichever I can get.

I can sit with a bowl of popcorn, but I end up dribbling the popcorn into my lap, I’m so mesmerized by the perfect craziness of these people. This is way beyond opposition, this is infants in control of the nursery, holding the wet-nurse by the tit and demanding chocolate or they will rip it off.

I live with dry mouth as a constant condition since I can’t keep it closed long before it pops open again in disbelief and I stand there mouth agape at ANOTHER statement by another joker. Sarah is back in the mix, and somebody yesterday said it best when they realized that the reason she always has that big gulp with her everywhere is that is the only thing big enough to carry all the vodka she guzzles on a daily basis to keep beating the drums of stupid. She is stupid, she defines it, she smothers it with Wasilla grins and Moosilini winks. She’s beyond stupid, she a blinking caution light stuck on yellow.

She would pick her nose in public if she could find it. She reserves most of her “speechifying” for Facebook where she culls the followers to only those who approve, and has ghost writers correct her world salad leaps of logic and syntax before hitting the “post”.

Harvard is busy trying to figure out who let TED into their hallowed halls and made them the laughing-stock of the Ivy League.

Texas is tipping into the gulf with so many weird ass representatives that it’s only fair to send life rafts to its citizens before they fall in the drink.  They make Arizona’s governor SEEM sane by comparison.

And it is all about comparison. If you line up Cruz, Gohmert, Perry, Bachmann, Lee, Stockman, King, and half a dozen others up in a line, they are proof positive that everybody in a mental institution should be released immediately. Again by comparison. Doesn’t that make you shiver when the crazy fool who hears voices and sees green people eaters and is thinking of getting a gun, figures he MIGHT be crazy, but then sees that bunch and says, “nah, I’m fine and heads off for the gun store?

I mean I wanna dig a hole and crawl in, and let me know Jesus when you are returning so I don’t miss your arrival to straighten all this mess out.

So how is your day going?

baby incoming

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