Humans are a total waste of life.
If I haven’t used that as a title already, it’s been an oversight on my part. I find this new "Write in My Diary" page to be unsatisfactory. I grow weary of setting my font with every paragraph; 10 pt. Veranda, while boring, is my font of choice, despite the number of times this page tries to tell me I like Times New Roman. I do not.
February is at a close, finally. My least favorite month of the year, if only for the weather. 28 days of snow, freezing rain, and cloud cover can dampen even the heartiest of spirits, and mine has proved to be anything but.
Something is bothering me. I can tell, because the words are flowing easily, with almost no effort on my part. Experience has taught me that this means I am trying to distract myself from something. Something more than usual, I think.
When I was a little kid I wanted to be a ballerina. My parents wouldn’t sign me up for classes. I wanted to be a gymnast. I wanted to play soccer. I wanted to figure skate. Later, I wanted to be a doctor or a surgeon. A writer. In 7th grade, I wanted to be a mortician. By high school I wanted to be a musician. And then chemistry. But do people ever live their dreams? Do people ever really become what they want to? Or do they end up working minimum wage jobs in nowhere towns, trying to support their children, living in a piece-of-shit house with no heat that the mortgage company can take at a whim? I see my parents and I wonder what they wanted to be. Did my mom want to be a housekeeper? Did my father want to be an unemployed drunk? Are they bad people because they never lived their dreams? I cannot think that they are bad people, perhaps ignorant, but not bad. Not evil. But how much of their circumstance is their fault? Or was it fate? God?
As a person, I wonder if I too am damned to failure. Certainly, I am motivated and allegedly "smart." I’ve been told numerous times that all the elements for success are there. But chance plays too much of a role in life for me to be comfortable in the knowledge of my eventual success. I know that the possibility of my becoming a failure and a disappointment is a reality, and I don’t have much control over it.
Control should be an issue of human concern. We’re all so secure…so sure that we’ll wake up in the morning. So certain that nothing bad will happen to us. People muddle in the unimportant and the shallow. I’m sure the coroner will be impressed with your manicure when you die in a freak escalator accident. No one knows what will happen to them every day, and it’s frightening. Disaster strikes whenever and wherever it wants, with no regard to race, locality, gender, religion, or whatever. Some day, my existence will terminate. I do not know when. I do not know where. And I do not know how. "God works in mysterious ways."
Paranoia threatens to overtake me, and I find the cool logic of my conscious mind slowly succumbing to smouldering tendrils of panic. Every situation evokes images of the possible death that awaits every goddamn minute of every fucking day. My own mortality, my lack of control, is an obsession that I cannot eradicate.
Funny how I switch topics.