thank you.

"The world is meaningless, there is no God or gods, there are no morals, the universe is not moving inexorably towards any higher purpose. All meaning is man-made, so make your own, and make it well. Do not treat life as a way to pass the time until you die.

Do not try to \"find yourself\", you must make yourself. Choose what you want to find meaningful and live, create, love, hate, cry, destroy, fight and die for it. Do not let your life and your values and you actions slip easily into any mold, other that that which you create for yourself, and say with conviction, \"This is who I make myself\".

Do not give in to hope. Remember that nothing you do has any significance beyond that with which imbue it. Whatever you do, do it for its own sake. When the universe looks on with indifference, laugh, and shout back, \"Fuck You!\". Remember that to fight meaninglessness is futile, but fight anyway, in spite of and because of its futility.

The world may be empty of meaning, but it is a blank canvas on which to paint meanings of your own. Live deliberately. You are free."

found here.

quick little math lesson

When I graduated college, I learned about subtraction. When we're in first grade or so we learn the arithmetic action of subtraction, the mathematical component and motions, but it's the anthropological, psychological concept of subtraction that doesn't really kick in until much later. About what you have left in your life when everything else is removed.

I've been formulating this theory because today I came home and my roommate had unexpectedly moved out. I dimly knew she'd be headin' out soon, but I've been too wrapped up in my last film project here for it to kick in that this weekend she'd be gone. So I came home, and saw the unexpected physical manifestation of what my life was like once she was subtracted from it.

All the shit I've accumulated in my years on this coast is pushed into corners, and this is the difference that is left in our lives once she is subtracted. My sneezes echo.

Seeing this math problem led me to think about subtraction and the parts of my life that have been shed now that we are scattering. I'm all that's left in this apartment. I'm looking at my life now that the social construct is taken away, the roommate removed, the college subtracted, and the film shoots are at an indefinite hiatus now that the necessary academic requirements are no longer relevant/impending/impeding. So...what's left are the parts of my life I haven't looked at very often. The lesser parts. Like why I pick at my cuticles. Or fixate on the things(people) I shouldn't.

This is a pessimistic way of looking at things. Wise man say you have education, relations, riches, and LOVE. Which I'm truly, painfully, aware of. But right now, I can only hear my typing clattering noises clicking weakly in the empty apartment and my social calendar is empty. Shit. I'm a negative number.

H.A.G.S.

There's always these little chillen's being carted around Hofstra's campus, trotted out from some nearby daycare center when the weather warms up a bit, and sometimes I want to run up and smack the smiles off their faces and yell I KNOW YOU'RE THREE. BUT PREPARE FOR WHEN YOU GET TARNISHED AND IT'S NOT FUN ANYMORE.

I had no idea that I would become this jaded. There wasn't an inciting event that lured me away from enthused orgiastic acceptance of unfortunate life circumstances, or any riotous fight with a loved one that made me the way I am, but here I am. Anesthetized. Overlooked. Unconscious.

When I'm stuck in traffic now, in the summer, on the Belt Parkway, people roll down their windows and just stew in the muggy heat out there on the asphalt. Lots of old people clutching the wheel and waiting for their exit to crawl by since I live in a "NORC" (naturally-occurring retirement community). We start out sprinting, just kind of racing for an inevitable flag to fly by like a graduation or a marriage, getting there as fast as we can until at some point we see the definitive light at the end of the tunnel and we slow down. We age and we move slowly and we stutter and we forget and we lose ourselves in the marathon. We put up a fight.

It's raining now. Rain always smells like pennies. I walk outside and can smell weird minerals.

I'm transitory. I am aware that we are always transitory, that because we are aging and moving and talking and changing at all times, that we are permanently transitioning from one moment into the next so that we may string together a personal, linear, sequence of events and scrapbook it and call it a life, but I feel especially transitory. Aleatory. Moving without purpose. This part of my life will go undocumented in my scrapbook.

In my french literature class this past semester, these two kids gave a presentation and asked everyone in the class to write out on a notecard what we want to be when we grow up. Yes, phrased like that, in a college course. I instinctively wrote "happy" (which has been my every shooting star/birthday candle/fountain coin/eyelash wish since I was a kid, but don't tell anyone that or it won't come true) and then the people giving the presentation asked who wrote happy. Of course my hand shot up, because I assumed that many people would have answered similarly. They didn't. They were astronauts, forensic anthropologists, dance studio owners, exotic trade derivatives. I was the outlier for just wanting to be happy.

I say things, a lot, I talk real big when it comes to my future, but I gotta say folks, when it comes to graduating college and staring down my identity for the first time, I actually feel like I've just been flung out of slingshot blindfolded and I can't even feel the trajectory. It's scary. It's normal, and expected. Right? We base our entire beings around the confines of some sort of synthesized academic personality and we identify with the people who have chosen the same interests so we conform to create a group, and find our role within this group, which is easier than tackling a larger percentage of the population. It's simple. We categorize. We eke out our identities and build ourselves up within these little microcosms, which just seems like exercises in futility once we have finished school and all of our anthropological attempts at existence return, sunburned, to their separate suburban homes with bidings of a good summer and see you soon. I'm going to miss my friends.

I can't remember everything about college. I mean, I remember these little moments and these big walls, and those people who maybe saw me when most didn't, but mostly I remember the spaces that contained me. That dorm, that bedroom, this one. I remember you and I remember the smiles that glowed in the dark and I remember the bone-crushing exhaustion and I remember pushing through that and I remember momentary connections and that's why I can't stay in New York. Nobody settles down here. No one grows up. Manhattan is a playground. Some people fall in love. I just shatter. At this point, my heart just wants to know it exists.

So, I watch the rain and I bleat out insipid refrains online into nowhere and hope to reach some sort of semi-enlightened catharsis. I mostly feel like an untethered kite. And I'm sorry for that. I'm mostly really sorry for the things I never said. Like thanks. I love you. It's been the best four years of my life.

Here's an irrelevant but currently-listening-to-song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOAPzYJprS8