3 posts tagged “existential crisis”
I've been told I need to stop depressing people who are otherwise attempting to have a normal conversation with me.
me: how are you?Jenn: me'eh me: muy mal
I don't really know how I can stop myself from doing this, except to add after every statement, "I like kittens?" The truth is, I just don't find what I say depressing. Just the other day I began (what I thought to be) an insightful look at the ridiculous practice of having a symbol to represent the concept of infinity--what's the point? We can't even grasp the idea of infinity, so to attempt to write it with two little circles is absolutely hilarious. Somehow it all had to do with the human fear of finitude, but unfortunately, my companion did not find this quite as amusing, and suggested I change the subject.
Oh, but today I stumbled across a Facebook group entitled, "I Wish I Were Your Derivative So I Could Lie Tangent to Your Curves." Brilliance, pure brilliance.
The following marks my third installment of the PPP (Philosophy Post-It Project):
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
The piano practice room is a fitting place, I decided, to complement my other places (the study lounge in my dormitory and the mailbox area). It is only a matter of time before the entire campus is riddled with my adhesive joy, and with Natalie working as my partner-in-crime a day south of me, it shall be wonderous.
(By the way, thanks to Sabrina I decided to change the name from Natalie's original suggestion of Philosophy Post-It People to Philosophy Post-It Project, which sounds slightly more superior).
To change the subject drastically, I have lately been thinking of people's compulsive need (me included) to creat to-do lists for accomplishing goals. The more I think about it, however, the more existentially claustrophobic I become: it seems like every deed I cross off the list is one more deed closer to my finitude. I am, as one could say, keenly aware of my Tillichean anxiety of ultimate nonbeing, and it unsettles me greatly that I can organize my life according to a day-to-day list--
Sorry for my depressingclean room (die a little)
finish writing paper (die a little)
run to the drug store (die a little)
email professor (die a little)
There is a town in Georgia called Between. I know this because I drove through it yesterday: it lies halfway between Monroe and Loganville (hence the clever name), the former of which was host to a family reunion I guiltily felt I should attend. I think the very fact that a town is named Between because of its geographic relevance to two other slightly-to-rather-large towns is not only amusing, but automatically qualifies it for Best Named Place Ever Award, the only other town ever to have received this prestigious award being the fictional Nowhere Land mentioned in the Beatles song. I think in the hazy ephemeral world of musical notes floating around the atmosphere, Nowhere Man's Nowhere Land is right next to Between, Georgia, and the nonexistant train connecting the two places carries no passengers except for the conductor, who still manages to methodically work his way from carriage to carriage, searching for tickets to punch.
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Speaking of family, which I wasn't actually before except to briefly mention the painful reunion I attended wherein I knew exactly four people (my mother, my brother and my grandparents), I learned the other day something quite terrifying about my geneology. My father has always been obsessed with mapping his family history. He has traced possible relations to William Wallace (okay, but who isn't related to him?), someone on the Mayflower, and of course a distant relationship to a major American corporation that shares our name yet gives us none of the money. My father often bemoans my mother's family's lack of consideration to their jumbled heritage, which includes not only all the British isles and all of western Europe, but some Swedes thrown in for good measure. But I digress--the startling revelation was that all this while I naively assumed that when my father said I was part-French, it meant that my relatives sat about in a cafe one day in Paris with a glass of wine (or absinthe) thinking, "Zees America soundz ohkay" (please note the generic French accent I worked so very hard to replicate in order to generate a more authentic tone to my rambling). And then they came over, and eventually it was my destiny to be born, or it was probably more like contingency as Sartre would have us believe. But actually--
My French relatives came from French Guiana. That's in South America. That's an entire continent of the world I have always just thought of as slightly to the south of me, quite interesting but really, what? Ignoring for a moment that by process of elimination my ancestors were (probably) terrible slave owners who later actually settled in New Orleans from whence a branch of my family spawned, it still leaves my mind reeling over the fact that with a simple ambiguity of words and some semantics twisted about, I am part-Guianean.
