A long day at work, failing computers and dealing with transfer credit from
Belize and problems from other departments and all kinds of bizarre crap. I sat out
rush hour in the
coffee house watching the
traffic go by, unwinding by reading
Alain de Botton's
The Consolations of Philosophy. After reading the first section, on the life and death of
Socrates, I read this in the second section, on
Epicurus:
We are often, in the words of the Epicurean poet Lucretius, like `a sick man ignorant of the cause of his malady.'
That is who I am. Too many problems, too many
self-destructive habits, too many fits of depression whose cause I cannot fathom. Bad news today, of course, with my plans and schemes and dreams unraveling, and even if I finessed my way out of these problems, I still have yet to address or even discover the reasons why I keep fucking everything up. Too tempting to ignore it all and sink deeper into this mess, but it all seems so insurmountable, and so stupid, really. Get your life in fucking gear.
It is the little things, a good book, a decent cup of
coffee, great music, driving fast, the stupid little
monkey pirate figure I bought for my father today, a vicious article somebody wrote for
Maxed that had me in stitches last night, the laugh of someone in my office, that keep me going. But these fragments are not enough to shore up these ruins (My God! An
allusion to
T.S. Eliot? What a fucking
geek I am!), not enough to sustain my life while I ignore the important things. Or perhaps these things that give me pleasure, as Epicurus might suggest, are what is truly important, and everything else is just around to support those things.
Still, I can quote Epicurus all day and that won't get my fucking
thesis written.