Wednesday, September 9, 2009

The unbelievable shallowness of my life


Look, a new dress which requires shorts underneath.

I don't ever claim to be doing anything meaningful, but I think I may have hit a new low this time around. My contributions to the world these days usually consist of polluting the air with noises and methane gas and teaching Japanese people words for anus-related byproducts and growths. Tonight I went to the mall, ate a fattening dinner (which was delicious - fried pork cutlets in miso sauce, tofu, miso soup and white rice), sent a bunch of inane text messages to my friends, laughed like twelve year olds about tasteless jokes, drank hot chocolate, and took a taxi home when I could have easily walked. On Sunday I went shopping with Miho for approximately 7 and a half hours, bought a bunch of clothes which I will probably end up wearing less than 30 times each, took vain photobooth pictures, and ate McDonalds fries well after 6 p.m.

Most days consist of sitting at work resenting the fact that I'm at work, co-teaching a class or two, posting unnecessary quibbles on an Internet message board, and spending money after work to socialize. Sometimes when I'm quite bored at home, I'll play dress-up and take pictures of my outfits.

I'd like to start reading things again, but I'm too lazy to go through the embarrassing procedure of either fumbling my way through an eye doctor appointment alone or feeling like a dumb idiot while a friend plays translator for me, all because I left my glasses in Brooklyn. I'd like to read something that has nothing to do with real life, maybe about cults in Inner Mongolia or Austrian subversive performance artists in the 1960s or fakirs or ayahuasca shamans or something. Isn't that silly, reading escapist nonfiction to feel more "cultured" or whatever?

My friend Oliver in Germany says that in a few years he's going to crack and eventually totally reject western civilization and go be some kind of shamanistic druid hermit in the rainforest forever. I kind of giggle when I think about that, but I see the appeal. Life sort of loses meaning once you fall into a pattern and you're not devouring information like you do in school. One finds all sorts of ways to justify self-wounding hedonism, e-snarkiness, and nihilism. Not like I actually understand nihilism for sure because I never bothered to read about it and the Wikipedia article was too verbose.

All that wank aside, I do have an abundance of love in my life. Loving relationships on three continents with friends, family, more friends, a few other friends, and a certain special someone who I've been in love with for almost three years. When it really boils down to it, I'm such a social person that this is more than enough to keep me happy.

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