The semester began and with it came a few thousand vibrant, vital youths each eagerly seizing every day like a kleptomaniac in a calendar shop. It is exhausting to watch so much enthusiasm, and it will be worse watching this new student body plummet from its massive life-high in a few months when midterm grades come in. I’d like to preempt the fall and say to every new college student: don’t seize the day.
Let me contextualize a bit. My definition of seizing the day is taking every opportunity to make the present fantastic, and it sounds wonderful. What an ideal life you’d have if every moment was locked in your grasp, if you controlled every day, if your life was a nonstop seizure. It would be wonderful if you could make every moment a fresh, new experience. There are, I think, two types of people who live in this way: children and drug addicts.
If ever there is a statement to quote me on, let it be this one: there is almost no difference between a child and a meth addict. Both are loud, sticky things with little respect for boundaries; both treat public places as their restroom and public restrooms as fecal-art galleries. And really what unequivocally binds drug addicts and children is their sense of immediacy. When a child wants a toy, it does not want that toy after a few weeks of paid labor. No, it wants that thing right now, and you’re trash if you cannot provide it. Similarly, a drug addict–a proper addict with scabs and skin that looks wet but isn’t–will stab your face right off if you’re in the way of what they want.
There is a great reason why children mature and drug addicts tend to die in puddles of themselves: their habits are unsustainable. If your life is devoted to instant gratification, you are guaranteed only gratifying instants and not much else. Instant gratification is the sugar high of ideologies, briefly wonderful then a crash when the high inevitable fails. That is no way to live.
So, new students and anyone else, for the sake of your health, do not surrender to your impulses or the advice of fictional poetry teachers. Instead, carefully plan your spontaneity to avoid financial, academic, or social repercussions. Don’t spend your days climbing trees or flying kites or having promiscuous sex with strangers in movie theater bathrooms. That kind of behavior causes broken limbs and babies, and nobody wants those.
However, you can plan for your good times. Save money; don’t use your sick days at work; do homework in advance, and write down everything your impulses told you to do. Then, when you’re prepared, take a few days off work, drive a couple of towns over or even out of state, then blast your way through that list because nobody knows who you are.
Or, alternatively, buy a whole cake, and eat it in the dark.
A very intriguing viewpoint.
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Thanks!
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Ok, I’ve changed my mind. Don’t watch Dead Poets Society.
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Ha! The only thing I knew from that movie was something about seizing the day so I had to write something like it.
I might still check it out for the big contrast in attitude
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Joking aside, I think some part of you will appreciate it. Maybe the human part, the not-so-bitter teacher in you, the magical princess side, the today-is-no-sarcasm-day part… You get it.
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I’ll try catering to that human side a little more. I usually keep it chained up in the garage. It would probably like a movie
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Let me know then how your human and non-human sides reacted to the movie. It would be fun to hear the story (which could be touching or dreadful).
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I may write something about it when I finally see it. I’ll aim for that spot right between touching and dreadful; that’s where I live.
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I knew it. It’s not a bad place to be in, I think.
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It seems nice. I prefer it to anywhere else
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Funny though, I hate in-between-ness. In general. It’s one or the other for me (in that sense, extremes work just fine).
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I’ve always been a all or nothing person, but I can’t quite live there in writing. Maybe I’m more genuine in this than in real life. Probably that.
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Maybe it’s the genuine-writer part of you that keeps me coming back to reading your posts.
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Maybe. I like that idea
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Maybe I would like to start this reply with the word “maybe” since we’ve been both abusing it in the last 4 comments (meta, I know).
And if you go back to the Proust Questionnaire post you’ll see that my answer to the question about the most overused phrase is “maybe”.
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Well now I want to use it way more, but I’ll resist in the interest of not getting too meta. “Maybe” and “really” are definitely my most overused words, and I’m going to be acutely aware of that for just long enough that they won’t appear much in the next post, but it’ll be back to normal in the one after.
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And perhaps “bitter” too?
Now that you’ve mentioned it, I will make sure I count your “maybe’s” and “really’s” when I read the next post.
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Oh no… Don’t put yourself through that. I don’t even remember if I said it much, which means it might be there a lot
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