Titles Are Just Another Tool of Oppression, Man

And so I've been thinking a lot lately because this is vacation time and sorry to disappoint your bizarre expectations if you thought anything productive or constructive would ever come out of this sabbatical. But thinking is dangerous business because who knows where it will ever lead and lately it's been pretty nihilistic, all doom and gloom pity party for one right this way sir.

Everything seems pretty hopeless from right here and I've been spending time with my friends lately and this isn't even enough to cheer me up these days because I keep thinking that these people who I hang out with, while amazing wonderful people and etc, these people are not in sync with me. There is a fracture somewhere, it's minute and tiny and I can usually forget that it's even there, but then I am once again reminded that we are operating on different wavelengths. I don't want to say I'm smarter than them because "smart", what is that you know, it's relative and not the most useful adjective here but I'd definitely say that I am more in tune with the world around us, more aware, more cognizant of the relationships, the causes and the effects, the consequences of actions, the ripples created by butterflies and whatever else it is you get from picking up a newspaper and taking liberal arts courses and reading books by dead white guys with important names.

University is the time and place where you are supposed to find your kindred spirits and bunker down with people who you will know for the rest of your life and share great experiences with and stay up late studying for exams or whatever but I've missed that train and my friends are still the same people from high school which means that we are as diverse and spread out as can be and maybe sometimes I think maybe these people are not the best people to hang out with because these are not the kind of people who ever discuss the last book they read or who ever have any meaningful contact with pretentious indie rock or ever feel the need to talk politics and ethics and religion and whenever those topics do come up I feel like a university professor participating in a grade school debate, which is unfair of me to say but I'm not going to lie here, now, about this.

It makes sense that my lack of any meaningful emotional ties to this university I've been attending for one and half years is part of the problem of my great disconnect. I am trying to propel myself, an island, through four years of tortuous schooling with no prize to aim for and no friends to cheer me on and lift me up and say, hey if you ever want to talk about the underlying causes of the American Civil War and the negative, lasting effect of reconstruction on the South, well I'm here for you. There are no girls to impress and no friends to compete for marks with and there is certainly no deep seated, bosom born love and passion for history to push me to higher levels and it all seems so pointless again.

Whatever whatever whatever is just what I want to say, shout, whatever, just want to get that message across that I don't care and I don't know what to do or where to go or what to think or how we do or anything at all really. I don't know anything. Basically.

I want to write a story, or a script, or a song or make a webcomic, or do something but I do not want to go back to school or have anything to do with formal learning because formal learning only results in formal tests on that formal learning and I don't care about the learning to start with so the testing isn't going to go well just by design. Man. Whatever.

Forget this noise, you know? Goodnight.

Horatio Halpern