A Long-Overdue Update

Once upon a time, Albert Camus said "every day is a fight, so you best bring your fucking a-game." Actually, that's paraphrased... he actually said "I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day."

To remind yourself of this, be sure to attempt the closest shave possible on every applicable morning. If all goes well, you'll draw blood at least five times. Good morning, endorphins.. how are you? Good to hear. I'm doing juuuuuust fine.

Had a good conversation recently that I can't get out of my head- it's really driven home the fact that I've learned so much from my experience here, from having time to delve into my own head while finding new and interesting ways to pass the 'survival' threshold and barge into the 'thrive' zone. The prior is one of those lessons.

What else? Ahhhh yes... again with Camus. "Everything is ridiculous. Learn this. Accept it. Never stop fighting it." Or, again with the real quote... "From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all." From Camus' essays on Sisyphus, the idea is that people can be almost completely satisfied by relatively meaningless and wasteful struggle. Things here have been almost entirely an adventure in trial and error, an approach that I wasn't so keen on before, mostly because I had to reap the consequences of error. Then, though, I didn't understand the amazing trade-off of usually temporary consequence for the boon of unforgettable knowledge and wisdom. The questions are not 'why am I running up this hill and dodging falling boulders' or 'when does the hill end,' but rather 'what am I learning from this?' Trust me, after you spend $15 you don't necessarily have on soymilk that turns out to be dirt-water grey and sweet as sin, you never ever do it again.

People need this struggle. If they don't have it, they create it for themselves (See: Earthquake Button Theory). The primal instinct of man is to struggle for survival; in the civilized setting we find ourselves in these days, we don't enjoy the same adversity that we used to. Nothing is hunting us, we don't need to kill to eat, the human race will still be here whether we pass futilely or not. So, naturally, we've replaced these ancient problems with new ones. We've replaced it with utter absurdity. Illogical systems of reward, punishment and organization. "In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying," quote Bertrand Russell. Furthermore, "Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim." Does this mean that we should play by these revised and become the criminal? Absolutely not. Camus reminds us that the only acceptable response to this absurdity is to rebel. Do everything you can to fix it. The boulder will be at the bottom of the hill when you wake up the next day, waiting for you to do it all over again. That is what will fulfill your primal instinct. That right there.

I've also rejected the premise that our generation, now as adults, have the responsibility to carry the rules of the old into the future. No, no. We're the adults now, and we get to decide what that means. If that means eating cereal and ice cream everyday, so be it... just mind the consequences. If that means knocking on your neighbour's door and greeting him with a number of BB gun rounds before walking to work, so be it! Just mind the consequences. We've been raised with this idea that adulthood is about no longer doing what you want to do in the name of being proper and responsible. This is ridiculous. People still do exactly what they want; the fact that the consequences of one's actions change, that's where the problem is. It's not that we don't do what we want, it's that we want different things than we did, at least to some extent. That is how it always has been. Arranged marriages were accepted to avoid the scrutiny of the public, people become business majors with the ultimate end of financial freedom in mind, so on and so forth. The interesting dilemma of our generation is that many of us still want the same things. Many of us want to spend an entire day sitting around drinking soda and playing Super Nintendo games. Many of us want adorable penguin trash cans and shirts that play MP3s. So do it, I say! Do it! Just be mindful of the potential consequences of your actions. That's how people have been living for thousands of years. Now is not the time to stop because of some bogus doctrine of expectations that has been handed down to us. In summation: do what you want, just don't be terribly short-sighted.

There are other lessons, but it's about time to get up, get going and teach some students how to use English appropriately. I may also need more coffee.

-토마스