Life Sucks
First off, I realize my blogging has been sporadic lately. I think it’s because my routine has been disrupted. I have a new job, and I don’t feel comfortable blogging at work yet. Work was where I used to most of my blogging — gee, ain’t I a good worker?
I’m not feeling like a happy camper lately. I’m having one of these existential/downish moments. Yesterday at work it hit me that I’m actually going to be litigating. I don’t want to be a litigator! I don’t want to be in court. I can’t think well on my feet. I’m not very adversarial. Why did I decide to take this job? Because, in an attempt to please my conscience or my inner parent, I wanted to be able to say that I gave lawyering a try.
Dumb idea.
On the other hand, the hours aren’t bad — 9 to 5 mostly. And my boss and the environment are very laid back, which is great. But I hear there may — occasionally — be an evening or weekend required. And the pay, while higher than my clerkship, could still be higher.
This isn’t for me.
So I’ve been thinking lately that I might go back to school next fall. So many times in my life I’ve thought about becoming a psychotherapist, and I think that’s what I finally want to try. I’m interested in psychology, and I like working with people, encountering people’s stories, setting my own hours, wearing what I want, and creating my own relaxed office space. Seems more up my alley. So this year I might apply for M.S.W. (Master of Social Work) programs. I wonder if it would be better to get a Ph.D. in psychology. I don’t know which is better. I’m going to talk to my therapist about it.
In the meantime, whatever happens, I’ve got this job for at least a year, and I need more money. I’d like to get a cell phone and cable TV and not worry about how much they cost. The area in life where I can cut expenses most easily is in my rent. I need a new apartment.
I just don’t know where I want to live. Sometimes I want to move to Manhattan. Sometimes I want to look for a different place in Jersey City. Sometimes I want to move to the New Jersey suburbs, such as my parents’ town. Sometimes I want to move back to Charlottesville, Virginia.
I don’t know if I want to live alone or if I want a roommate. I just don’t know.
You know what’s funny? Nobody who reads my blog likes to hang out with me in person. The people who do like to hang out with me in person are all people who don’t read my blog or even know that I have one. They’re people who don’t know all these details about my inner life. Once people realize what goes on in my head, they don’t want to hang out with me. Perhaps it’s not good to know too much about a person.
I’m just feeling depressed right now. It’s dark and cloudy out, and the weather has turned cold, and, given the state of the world, who knows if we’ll live to old age?
Even without terrorist attacks, life pisses me off. Every choice you make in life has a drawback. Any place I decide to live will have a drawback.
I don’t do well with drawbacks. I usually interpret a drawback to mean that I’ve made the wrong decision. I can’t commit to anything — a job, an apartment, an entrée, a cell phone — because once I arrive at a drawback, I want to change my mind.
Great literature has been written about the human condition. The message: life is hard.
What keeps us all from killing ourselves?
I remember learning the reason in high school — it’s the myth of Sisyphus. He just kept pushing that rock up the hill, knowing that it was going to come rolling back down anyway. He just kept on doing it. Is it hope that keeps us alive? Or is it the sense of a mission? I don’t know.
I’m going to the Gap. It’s chilly out, and I need new shirts.
If you stop and get caught up in all the negatives, they will bury you without fail. But, if you hold on to the many little things that make you happy (a new shirt, for example, or the feel of the sunlight warming your chill away, or the taste of a really good meal) they will carry you through the bad parts.
It’s all about putting a positive spin on things. Listen to a song you love, read part of an inspirational novel, then try to do something good on your own. You’ll be amazed at how much that brings you up,
Keep on, keepin’ on, muffin.
Great thinkers and deep feelers have always been able to see the pain or pointlessness of most of life. In fact, I once heard a terrific Doctor state that depressed or saddened people usually are people who are truly seeing things as they are……just without any hope or softening.The real trick is in taking our wonderful brains and reasoning abilities and using them to see something of some value.There comes a time in each of our lives where its emotionally sink or swim. I hit that time more than once ( does that seem fair to you? I want a re-deal on my life cards) What came from it was the realization that I have no where to go but up.The thought that maybe this is all worthless, but I may be able to releive someone elses pain for one moment of their life, sometimes gives me that golden feeling. I will make something good of this life, just to spite “Fate”. I will enjoy my music, my art, my writing, my kids, my husband…………….just to spite it all. I am here and damn it, my life is going to be colored by me.Maman always said I was hard headed.
I say go for the schooling. You can never have too many academic adventures. If all else fails, you can always have your old life refunded.
I know that most of my friends who wind up at my site, usually end up looking at me funny. Only one hasn’t felt they “saw” me nekkid. But ya know what? I spent too much of my life being hiding who I am, Im too old and too damn tired to keep doing it. So love me…….or don’t.
I love your words.
I would love to have your job, but that’s because mine is so much worse. Either way, I can fully relate to everything you have expressed today. You seem to be speaking my dissatisfactions.
Make sure you think things through. That seems like obvious advice, but really. Have a goal in mind before you choose a degree you want to pursue. See if you can make the degrees you already have work for you.
The alternative may well be finding yourself five years older with another degree and little interest in pursuing yet another career you’re well qualified for.
And don’t generalize about people who do or don’t read your blog, because we’ll then correctly point out that your conclusions there are bunk.
Camus says that Sisyphus is happy with his rock–because he knows that pushing the rock up the hill and watching it roll down again is all there is to life, so you might as well accept your lot in life and just do it. The tragedy of life is being conscious of the fact that you’re pushing the rock (that’s why stupid people never get depressed). The joy of life (or at least contentment with it) is accepting the burden and realizing that there is no alternative (well, there is one, I suppose, but comer on–get help or go on meds or snap the hell out of it–suicide and suicidal thoughts are the refuge of the weak). Camus makes life seem bleak, but it’s also oddly comforting. Life is hard–and sometimes it’s really hard. But we have to suck it up and deal with it.
Yeah, don’t generalize about the hanging out thing. If I were closer, I think I’d really enjoy your company on a regular basis.
Maybe you suffer from the ‘is this all?’ feeling?
I remember that while I was at university, doing research in the final stages of my study, I felt that this rapid progress of gaining knowledges and doing new things was just a little reflection of ‘real working life’.
When I was 27/28 or so, it hit me that working life meant a slowing down, not in increase in speed.
The sky was the limit I thought, but you need a bit of turbulence to be lifted higher towards the sun.
I’m 31 now. I don’t like all of the time what I am doing, but looking back at the past three years of working life for my current company, boy, have I learned a lot! And they even raised my paycheck in the period ;-)
I often think “I need to be doing something different NOW or otherwise I will end up doing what I am doing now for the rest of my life.” It maked me depressed that I am not able to simply do something else.
I’ve learned that I can do whatever I want whenever I want, and I am pretty certain I will get a PhD someday, but not now. Life has other excitements in store for me. My job made it possible to travel for pleasure when I like, to buy a house on the riverside in the old harbour part of my hometown, to buy whatever cd I like, to slide through life without the worries I had when I was still a student. I just don’t acknowledge that often enough.
Not every working day can be a new and exciting journey in the Land of Oz.
You live in a city where opportunities and things to do are countless, and most people would trade places with you in an instant.
I only know you through your blog, and I would say you just have the same kind of worries most people have from time to time. You just have a gift to express them very well in words.
take care.
OK, Hon….
Here’s what I’ve been thinking lately – to honor those over 6000 lives that were lost the day that has so markedly altered people like you and people like me, we have simply got to soldier on. You’re sounding pretty seriously depressed – and I’m right there in the trenches with you, just out here in sunny SF. It is my thought that we have got to honor the fact that we are still alive…unlike those poor folks on September 11th who’s only mistake was to show up for work at the World Trade Center and who were going about their jobs when a fucking jet liner crashed through the windows and ended it all for them. We have been given more time. If you don’t like your job, you have been given the chance of more time to try something else. My world is pretty much coming to an end here… it’s looking like my life here in SF will close and I’ll probably return to New Jersey. My ailing Mom needs help and, I don’t know, the call of home seems to have been re-awaked in me after September 11th. I don’t know what will happen for me there – I don’t have a batchelors and I have even less of a sense of what I should do next. But I will do something…something will come to me. I haven’t really learned much in this life, but one thing I know is that life has always taken care of me. There really isn’t any reason why I should believe that will change.
I was just wondering…..I had read Jonno’s blog for today and then I read yours – have you ever been to New Orleans? I love the Big Easy because it has this uncanny abilitly to seek out your greatest weakness and then exploit it. Got a penchant for booze?…you’re drunk in minutes. Enjoy getting stoned?..you’re high in a twinkle. Have a weakness for sex?…you are in a compromising position (or, at least hot on the trail of one..) in a flash. You may wonder why I would suggest pursing these things, but it has been my experience that you have to know your weaknesses AND ACCEPT THEM before you can move on. And hell, what a way to go! New Orleans can do that for you.
I know, I know…crazy advice…but hell, these are times for licking wounds. I just wanted to say that it really is ok that we need to do so.
Hang in there, guy.
Brendan
(and may i just add that you’re more than welcome to come visit any time you like to test out Brendan’s theory for yourself … ;-)