99 Problems...

… but a bitch ain’t one. I kind of wish a bitch (literal or derogatorily figurative) was one of my problems, though; that’s a kind of problem I could stand to bear. As it is, I fill my days alternately with marathon literary exploration and hard drankin’. Pretty standard college fare, I’d imagine, and yet, I feel totally separate from that venerated American experience. My little sister facebook’d me earlier* to ask how “college life” was. How the hell should I know? I’m out here in the boondocks of higher education, watching my life veer wildly between noble experiment and spectacular intellectual car crash. It’s less intense than I make it sound, yes, but it’s disconcerting all the same. Wherefore, if not towards the professional world or the social life level-up (to awkwardly utilize gamer terminology), is all this energy, however responsible, being expended?

The end of the semester brings about an unhealthy flurry of frantic non-activity. Life is day-to-day, rather than week-to-week; there are the expected rituals, yes, but it’s less routine than necessary, at this point. The maintenance of habit (I’m being intentionally abstract here: use your imagination) in the attempt to latch onto something meaningful, to connect with my life itself if not the people in it, is the new primary objective. In the midst of all this hurry-up-and-do-nothing anticipation lies my inability to retain any sort of moral knowledge from the multiplicity of experiences I encounter. Sometimes the failure to change my indolent ways is overbearing, and I react, stubbornly, by becoming less responsible. I intentionally slept for almost twelve hours today, and I’m not sure why. Maybe I thought if I kept at it awhile I’d wake up an adult.

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* Being privy to my sister’s daily social thoughts and interactions has become a horrifying fascination. What happened to the sweetly dumb little creature with whom I used to enjoy a bowl of Froot Loops and a Spongebob marathon? When did she start calling her friends on her cellphone to chat unreflectively about the gloriously empty-headed goings-on in the anxious pre-teen social world? When did she start doting on new school heartthrobs/hair-gelled mannequins like the Jonas Brothers? (Not last summer, I tried unsuccessfully to bond with the little one by mentioning how I found the vaunted JoBros to be, of the entire Disney Channel coven, the most tolerable. At the time she replied confidently that she didn’t care for them—how fickle these ones can be.) She seems to be surely transforming into the type of person I used to resent so much in my angrier days, and I’m frightened not by the expectation that I’ll feel the same way about her, but that I won’t be able to.