Chronicles - Home

I get back to Columbia, after being away for less than a month, and my roommates have managed to put us all in a situation where we will no longer have living arrangements in just over a month. You would think that they would be wise enough to renew our lease while I was gone, but I suppose that is the sort of thing that gets overlooked without a reminder.

I can't say that I'm attached to the place, at least. Although, it's sort of annoying to think that I am going to need to relocate when I have even finished unpacking. Again, my life seems flanked on all sides by whatever sort of nature that is found inside of me that perpetuates transience and adventure. I've spent more time living out of my backpack than I have living in my house now. I've spent more nights with my arms around that bag than I have with my arms around any single lover-- or even all the lovers I've had recently combined.

I can't even figure out why I'm in this city.

I'm not part of the University that brings life to this town, nor do I hold a position of employment here, nor do I have a girlfriend to be with, nor even a place to live over the coming months. I have began asking myself where I want to go and what facets of my life I can cull with no regrets. I am admittedly an impulsive creature. I tend to do what I please as it comes to please me. Most my goals involve keeping options open rather than pursuing a terminus.

This year marks the 25th time my body has ridden this hunk of rock on it's trip around our solar centre.
Over these years, I've spent most of my time in the suburb-clad hills amongst the trees, concrete, critters, and cars. While I've spent at least a little time in most of the states of the union that binds the people of these lands, I cannot claim to be an adventurer as I haven't even began to go as far as my dreams tell me I could go. I've drank from streams of melting snow on mountain tops, kayaked between islands in the tropics, ventured into caves and canyons and colleges, yet have never made it as far as another continent.

I don't know why it matters. I suspect it really doesn't, but still I want to explore far away lands, meet interesting people, make stupid choices, live to tell the stories, and maybe even one day come to profit from my experiences. Still, here I am in a city I have no aspiration to be in. There seems to be no mystery-- nothing left to explore by any means of transportation-- for me to find and report back on. Mr. Obama urges each of us Americans to go out and pursue a higher education, and thus bastardizes the term. "Higher" education comes to be the status quo, and with that anything short of a masters fails to impress or be any higher education than what is literally expected of us to achieve by our leader.

In high school, a teacher approached me after class with tears coming down her eyes. I could tell she was trying to keep composure, but could help but submit to her emotions. Emotions are a valuable thing. They are to be trusted. It seems so often we over-think the simple facets of life, when (in reality) each of our bodies are so much smarter than our minds. When you're hungry, horny, happy, or hateful our body tells us, often without a single thought. And, here is a kindly woman whose body has invested into me so much to come to me in tears. She pleads with me to pursue my education. She tells me, between shelves of books, that she hasn't seen a student as smart as me walk these halls in all her time teaching. With that, I could feel my eyes grow hot and tense with tears of my own. I couldn't help but feel angry and sad and lost because I simply didn't care.

Years later, now, I still find myself lost. My scholastic education has all but failed. I recently got dropped from class by my instructor. She told me I wasn't fitting in with the student atmosphere. It was an English class. We were reading shit like Vonnegut-- the sort of thing I read in middle school over a decade ago. I had learned to keep quite around all of the 19 to 20 year-old kids. Any opinion on a story that isn't obvious sadly would merit a salvo of snide comments and suggestions that I was a fucking idiot and that my opinion somehow does count. Despite any textual support I could return fire with, I was discounted by a Professor telling me that what I was saying isn't what Kurt Vonnegut was getting at. In our society, the title "professor" is above that of "doctor" in that both have a PhD (which means they have expounded upon known knowledge), and gone to teach what they have discovered.

Professor Jones is my hero.
Who can be upset with a character armed with nothing but a bull whip and a PhD liberating holy relics from Nazis for the sake of culture? So let's say I wish to be an educated and fedora clad hero abroad. How the hell do I liberate culture, art, and all those hippie-dippie concepts I love if I can't even culminate my undergraduate experiences with a paper document from an accredited institution? In a wired world of instant global communication and information, is the title professor really a requirement to advance our antiquated educational paradigms? Any mook in our nation (and several others) can walk up to a library and key a question into a computer terminal to fetch information from a non-centralized location. Hell, they don't even need to use correct spelling; google doesn't care much for grammar and will tell you when you've bastardized a word.

I can't tell you where I'll be in five or ten years. I can't even tell you what state I'll be living in by June. I once promised this girl I would marry her if we were both twenty-eight and unwed, but that aside from that I have no obligations to fulfill and am free to do as I please. Hopefully I learn something in the next years, and (degree or not) hopefully I never have to kick someone out of my sphere of influence for having an idea that is outside of my notion of what information should be spread.

End Rant...

~ Mercury3