We’re losing all the icons man, Prince dead at 57, wasn’t expecting to wake up to that this morning. Soon we’re going to be left with Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift and Skrillex as our icons, and the majority of the kids of the next generation aren’t going to know the satisfaction of playing a real instrument or experience true talent beyond someone pressing the space bar on a laptop or flicking the auto-tune button in a studio.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this kind of stuff lately, the fragility of human beings. Not in a nihilistic or depressive sense, I’ve just been thinking about it.
It’s one reason I do admire my philosophy professor. She’s very open about the way she thinks and believes in the reality we observe every day without paying any mind.
The password on her computer is over twenty characters, supposedly to keep out hackers, students, or hacking students or student hackers. Perhaps even colleagues, I don’t know. When she screws up on a key, we have to wait another five minutes for her to type it out. That’s how long it is.
I too share the paranoia of hackers–and it’s well justified these days. If I had a dollar for every time Nigeria and China hacked one of my damn Gmail accounts, I’d have enough to fund the L.A trip I’m taking this summer.
She doesn’t like being video taped or recorded in any sense. Because my college is small, and the professors are surfers and pot heads even if they don’t identify as them and are usually chill about being recorded, I’ve never came across a professor who loathes it as much as this woman. She allows students to do so only if they’ve given her early notice and even then she lets you know how much she hates it.
One kid tried to sneak in a phone video and I thought heads were going to be chopped off. He’d slouched in his chair with his Iphone 6+ (yeah, the 5.7 inch one) and the camera light on facing her as she went on one of her infamous energetic rants. She caught sight of the light out of the corner of her eye and fell silent abruptly, pointed at the dumbass and said “Are you recording me?”
He shifted in his seat and lowered the camera a bit. She repeated herself and the room went cold.
Every fight I’d conquered in BloodBorne flashed behind my eyes at this moment. I was hoping we’d be bathing in student entrails.
He said, “Well, It’s just because I think you’re so great. It’s a compliment.”
She didn’t buy his excuse, shuffled on over to his side of the room, leaned over the balcony in the front of the lecture hall as close to him as she could possibly get, smiled, and calmly informed him she would snatch his phone and smash it to pieces on the concrete, she’d done it many times before and wouldn’t be afraid to do it again.
The best part about all of this was the student had really white skin, so his entire self turned into a beet.
I too hate being video taped. Perhaps not to that extent, it’s pictures that bother me the most. I’ve had my share of moments I’ve threw someone’s phone to the ground because they wouldn’t get it out of my face.
She’s just as forgetful as I am, in terms of the things people called “important”. You know, like time. And dates. She’s never late, but she always forgets which times our class is at, what time it ends, and what days they’re on, even this late in the semester. She’s had this problem since she was a child, she said, because she doesn’t believe time exists, nor does she believe reality exists. That was the introductory sentence to our class. She wouldn’t explain why, much to my dismay, and if I didn’t have social anxiety I would be in her office hours asking her her theory and justification to see if it overlaps with mine. Because I tend to believe the same.
If there’s a yell or a shout or a loud noise somewhere, or even someone’s phone ringing, she always pauses in the middle of the lecture, stares at us for a moment, and asks us if we heard that. We all say yes and she continues. I laughed the first time that happened because it’s true, you can never quite know how real something is when you don’t believe in this reality. I think everyone else thinks it’s just some weird quirk of hers, and I think she plays it up for entertainment purposes in terms of class, but I understand the logic behind it, that’s the most entertaining part for me.
She goes on tangents too, that’s the best part. Sometimes they’re relevant, sometimes they’re irrelevant, and sometimes they’re just plain nonsensical but in a relevant way if that makes sense.
But attending her lectures and moving on in life always gets me thinking about how much we don’t know, and how much we think we know. It gets me thinking about how centered we are on ourselves as a species and how strange it is we’ve developed so many different ideals and cultures and languages and how much stranger it is that we become so self-centered we feel we have a right to tell someone else their behavior is abnormal.
I just think it’s all weird.
To be quite honest, I’m bored, that’s my problem.
I’m bored with people who think money is valuable for anything other than survival, I’m bored with working, I’m bored with our “education”, I’m bored with standards, I’m bored with rules, I’m bored with “normality”. Maybe it’s just my twenties talking, just as my teens spoke well in the language of nihilism.
But this boredom isn’t like “Oh i’m bored with rules so let me go steal a car and stab someone in the eye”.
This boredom is like “Why am I not allowed to steal a car and stab someone in the eye? Why is that bad? I’m confused“.
This boredom is like “why do people waste their time with this petty reality? What gives them the confidence that this reality is reality? I haven’t seen any proof to convince me anything existing in this moment actually exists.
This boredom is like “What allows us to plan for a future we’re not guaranteed? Why do our brains just casually skip over the fact that we could all drop dead right now? I bet it’s hiding something from us. What prevents me from dropping dead this second?”
This boredom is like “Where are the fucking aliens? I’m bored of humans.”
This boredom is like “I can’t even ‘go against the grain’ without being clumped into a whole other group ‘going against the grain’ so am I really going against the grain?”
Humanity bores me, basically. Jobs and family and material things and enjoyment and sadness and everything is labeled as significant without any proof of any of them being significant. I’m bored with that. Life gets much more interesting if I try and construct it through the eyes of someone who sees no significance in anything, but only sits back and observes the chaos.
Instead, I stayed with some friends from middle school. We were the last true “goth/emo/rock” kids of our generation, I swear by it. We were in all black with the chains, the wrist bands, the dyed hair cut halfway over our face, and we headbanged during break. I still love metal, although I’ve since dropped the fashion statement. It gets too hot. I’d also look like a jackass at my school; I’m already paranoid people are constantly staring at me.
. . . but with smarts. I asked around in my AVID (a college prep course; only course I knew people in) class about how they calculated who got detention and who didn’t. Through a few other master skippers I learned how they counted days, weeks, and months, and how many skips you were allowed to get in a week and a month before they contacted your parents. If you managed to stay below that number, your parents never found out.
MentalTruths 