We will not matter.

The constant battle between following-one's-dreams and working-hard-will-lead-to-success baffles me. I am stuck between the two. People are split between the two. Some say that as long as you work hard, you succeed. Others say that if you're following your dreams, you succeed.

Perhaps, their definition of success differs. Comfort v/s Fame? The whole division of those who want to matter and those who want to survive, that John Green redundantly brings up in his novels. I guess those who want comfort, those who deem hard work to be the key are the ones who want to survive this world. While, those who want fame, those who follow their dreams are the ones who want to matter. Of course this is a very general and highly unscientific division of people.

But how true are Green's words when he says that there will come a time when none of us will matter. A time when Shakespeare will be forgotten, not because someone more important came along, but because no one to remember him will exist.

Our cognitive capability deceives us into thinking that the universe was created for us (human beings). Or maybe it's just that we wish to be important. But in reality, we are infinitesimal. We are nothing to the universe. It needs not acknowledge our existence. If a hypervelocity star decides to blow apart the earth into tiny bits and pieces, it shall. It won't stop for us petty human beings. We are inconsequential, or as we so graciously put it-collateral damage. The star won't care if Shakespeare could write in iambic pentameter or if someone inIndia could raise his hand for twenty-six years straight as a form of worship for Shiva. For that star serves the purpose, in that single instant, to destroy the earth.

And yet this is a melancholic thought; that the brilliance of Einstein, the art of Picasso, the music of Beethoven, the leadership of Alexander the Great, the stories of Charles Dickens, the words of Robert Frost, the cat paradox of Schrödinger, will all cease to exist. How narcissistic are we who can never stop pondering about our future when a day will come that we might have not existed at all. We will not matter.

I finally know why. Sometimes I say things without realizing their true meaning. A few months ago, in my college essay, I said that knowledge is power. I now understand why.

Knowledge is power because the lack of it scares us. The unknown is scary. Isn’t that why we fear death and darkness? Because we’re not sure of what we will find there. That is precisely why knowledge is power.

My satire on Tumblr!

Tumblr is a blogging website that has twirled the cyberspace around its fingers. It suffices to be a new method of procrastination-as if we needed another one. But let me assure you, it is much more than a simple blogging website. It’s like Fightclub, you can’t speak of it anywhere besides Tumblr but everyone knows about it. Looks like I just committed a peccadillo but I suppose I can justify my actions under public welfare. I think as I read this, the Tumblr users in this class would either be nodding their heads along with me or shooting daggers at me through their eyes. If you do neither, I will consider myself successful.

The Tumblr community can be neatly stereotyped in a few categories. My favorite category is called Political Correctness Activists. I think they’re definitely pièce de résistance of the entire community. These are the ones who feel the need to debunk everyone in this universe for their misuse of language. You can’t have a normal conversation with them without becoming the bane of their existence. For example, if you say cats are really cute, you will be attacked for making such a definitive statement. I mean, you should have said that “in your personal opinion cats are cute”. Moreover, cuteness is usually associated with appearance, and by calling a cat cute you are being disrespectful to the cat community which shouldn’t merely be judged by how “cute” they are. Saying that a cat is cute is also kind of racist or animalist (if such a thing exists) against other species of animals. Although it is important to avoid aberration in speech, casuistry ideas can’t be applied to every situation. And that is precisely what these people are doing.

Moving on, my second favorite kind of Tumblr users are the Anonymous haters. There’s an option on Tumblr where people can ask you questions without revealing their blog URL’s and let me tell you something about anonymity: it gives people a chance to voice their opinions without it being held against them. Now, usually this malcontent audience is fun to deal with because mainly they chastise you for your opinions. But my favorite part is when the person they’re sending lackluster hate mail to turns into a cantankerous baby. It’s so easy to lose temper and by doing so, the person ends up pandering the anonymous hater’s purpose i.e. to incite a reaction and depredation. The funny thing is though that hate mail is assumed to have a direct relationship with popularity. In some bizarre way, the amount of hate mail you get equates to your fame on Tumblr. So there are people who deliberately make statements that would get them hate mail instead of empathy. I suppose hate mail serves to be a way for hedonism for some.

There’s an unsaid rule on Tumblr that is very similar to the Miranda warning: everything you say can be and will be held against you. It matters not if you acknowledge that your statement was ad hoc to the given situation, it will face an unofficial trial by the Tumblr audience. For instance, if you dare to say that in your opinion Ron Paul is the best republican candidate, expect a mob of people to enlist his flaws for the next five centuries. Keep in mind that people on Tumblr are there to procrastinate and thus lack a life. So arguing back wouldn’t be wise unless of course you have homework to put off. I guess the good thing about this is that it makes you think twice before forming an opinion.

The Tumblr community is very open-minded. All opinions are welcome as long as your opinion coincides with the norm. The moment you deviate, all mellifluous words will be forgotten and you will be put under the limelight until you remand your opinion. Even nepotism wouldn’t work in such scenarios. I guess freedom of speech only works if your speech is not, de facto, free.

You learn a lot from Tumblr, especially terms like “Special Snowflake Complex.” It sounds like a disease but in actuality it’s a fake syndrome where you think you’re a special little snowflake because you think or act differently than others. It’s funny because you will see a lot of Tumblr users making fun of people with the aforementioned condition when they themselves are indeed a victim of this complex. There are also those who claim to not believe in labels and yet have a billion labels typed in their “About Me” section.

Sometimes I feel like Tumblr is a harbinger for generations to come. If so, then we can expect a lot more talking and less doing by the people. Of course, what I describe is bathos of the scene. I am a part of the very community which naturally gives me the right to jab at it.

Mask

It took me four minutes to peel my mask of. I examined the remains of glue hanging from my face as I recounted my performance in my mind. Timing? Perfect. Anxiety? Intense. Silence? Intimidating. Lighting? Daunting. This was followed by the fervid kudos. People inveigle me with their tautology applause. What they believe to be my heyday is in reality my rock bottom.

It surpasses my intellect. This emptiness, that is. I feel like a tree infested with fungi; so hollow and void of real thoughts. The irony of the situation is, however, that I put masks on to make a living. Each persona I wear should be beatitude that fills me up; something that erases nothing. But with each act, I lose myself. I believe I have started to live my performance. And every time I remove my makeup, I remove my own skin.

It’s easier that way, you know. Being someone else, criticizing someone else. That way, you know the ending to your story. It’s the uncertainty that I fear. What is to come? What will be? Oh how very terrifying it is. Why else is it that man fears death and darkness? Unknown is terrifying. Known bodes the mistakes of future. But mystery builds a new infrastructure and sometimes it can have dank foundation. Through my work, I neglect life. I truckle into my persona to avoid confrontation.

I miss people. I crave for friends who’re not two-faced sycophants. I yearn for company that would eliminate the fetid air of my house. I am tired of the prolix silence of my mind. Take this lagniappe away from me. I don’t want it. All these prototypes that I’m asked to follow are piling emptiness on me.

I look in the mirror and see a bête noire. As the crimson color from my eyeliner runs down my cheek, I begin to see myself. I am an incubus that wakes children up from the haven of their beliefs. I am the cold haunting merciless antagonist feeding on greed. I am the despairing forlorn lost beggar pleading for penitence. I see tears in my eyes. I am crying. But over what? For what? Maybe at myself, for becoming what I am today. Or perhaps at what I see from where I stand.

They say self-apathy is the worst. That the one who suffers gargantuan amounts of mental torture finds physical torture mundane. I can vouch for that. All these years. All those ecumenical performances. I was trying to build a life for myself when all I created was a lie.

Home.

I wonder how long it takes to transform a house into a home. How many cups of coffee need to be made before the smell of the paint goes away? How many socks need to lie around to show that it is more than bricks and paint?

It’s weird but I see so many people around me just waiting to, in rather colloquial terms, get the hell out of their homes. It just makes me wonder, do people seriously think that escaping to another place would make life better? True there are some perks of moving to a different place. But in all that glamour also resides raw sadness. It’s not the kind of sadness that you can cry and get over with. It just lives in you. It inhales your oxygen and exhales your carbon dioxide. It stays. You get over it but that’s not the gist of it.

You know the cliché saying, ‘home is where the heart is’? I wonder how many people leave their hearts behind in hopes of escape. Conformity is dangerous. Change is inevitable. But using change to seek happiness, that is not right. It’s kind of like giving up on something to avoid failure. Why face the darkness when another road is illuminated-be it from the light of the train bringing your doom.

Too many metaphors and not enough points.

Three Words.

You know what surprises me? The question asking you to sum yourself up in three words. Three words. From thousands of words, you are to sum up your entire personality in terms of three adjectives. Three adjectives that describe your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, your past, your present and your future. How absurd is that? How do you even answer a question like that? A question that is as open as the universe. I look at myself in the mirror and see so many faces absorbed in one.

I love writing. It's my passion and my escape and my reality and my fantasy. I write to discover. I write to understand. I write to empathize. I write to find peace. I write to create. I write to know myself. I wouldn't say that I can't live without writing but I will say that my soul would die without it.

Do I believe in the soul? That's another facet of me. My beliefs. I am willing to take a leap of faith here. I believe that there is such a thing as soul. There is something that dies within us when we die. Something beyond the activity of our heart. How could there not be? But then the term soul could just be a misnomer for something else. I don't know what. And that brings about another side of me.

I don't know. I don't know things and I am usually okay with saying so. This might be why people who pretend to know everything frustrate me. Because no one can possibly know everything. And the people who pretend otherwise are only deluding themselves. What is so wrong with admitting that you don't know something? Why is the person looked down upon for not knowing something? Now mind you, when I defend those who admit they don't know something, I am not defending ignorance. There is a very fine line between the two and must be acknowledged. And this brings about the side of my that is always wanting to understand things.

I want to know how things work, how people work, how our minds work-metaphorically and physically. Life is limitless. It's no Calculus problem, although my Math teacher would beg to differ. But it is a curious thing to ponder on. How can one even function normally while being unaware of the magnitude of what we don't know? And yet we do. Because the here and now precedes in priorities. And so it should.

You probably don't expect an eighteen year old to talk about mysteries of life over the latest episode of The Vampire Diaries and perhaps you're right in doing so. I do love The Vampire Diaries. And I also love Philosophy. I have a profound respect for books and artists. Science blows my mind away. Music incites a craving in me only to be fulfilled by Mozart or perhaps Beethoven. I secretly want to be a badass agent for something like CIA or maybe go on a hunt for horcuxes. Do something that would change the world someday, you know? And then I think of myself in terms of our universe. It makes me realize how small I am. It is then that I am reminded of my existence as a very small probability and of the fact that the world I live in is infinitesimal in comparison to what's out there. And here I am marveling at my inability to define myself in three words.

Which again brings me back to my question, how do you define such a huge spectrum of oneself in mere three adjectives? Do you begin to invent adjectives that cover the dominant side of yourself? Isn't that unfair, though, to the side that is there but not in the limelight? But is there even such a thing as injustice to oneself? I would apologize for digressing because I tend to do that a lot but then again, isn't that the point of this writing? I just wrote a little over 600 words about myself and I still can't decide on three words. Perhaps I'm a philosophical-teenager-who-wants-to-make-a-difference-in-the-world-while-watching-cheesy-tv-shows-and-listening-to-classical-music-who-also-loves-to-write.

But that's not an adjective.

I don't know what this is.

I refuse to give up.

People tell me over and over again that it’s hopeless. My cause for the fight is pointless. My aim is only achievable in some dream. That what I am working for is an Utopian world. That there is too much distress in the world and I should end my abortive mission. That I am doing is nothing more than chasing clouds. That I might as well try to bottle the ocean. After all, who am I to question the way things are?

“It’s a cold, bitter, world out there son,” they say. “Not worth the trouble. Go home and survive. That’s what we are all doing.”

I say so be it, my friend. So be it. And with that dictum in mind, I keep moving. I refuse to give up my iconoclastic task.

Some say I am stubborn. Some find inspiration in me. And some just laugh at my maudlin nature. But they don’t bother me. I’ll be damned if I take those contumelious words to heart.

My black hood juxtaposes my motives. As I tread down the street, I am ignored. I am nobody. I ensconce myself into the corner of a busy street, hidden from the eyes of people. I hear people bruit about each other. Some waggish stories make me chuckle while some vitiate my belief in humanity. As I move further along, I see the traumatic aftereffects of poverty. I see the internecine anger in the eyes of victims. These victims of theft have been robbed off their soul. I feel sorry for them. After all, soul is the most precious thing to man. And if the soul is modulated with, what has he left?

My maladroit tactics prevent me from doing most things but I am fairly observant. I have no prescience of the future but I can read signs from the portentous history. And what is present but an in medias res of the two?

I’ll be honest though, I doubt myself. I question myself every single day. The saturnalian thoughts in my mind just might destroy me. Some say that having your own thoughts is a touchstone of the wise. But nobody talks about the curse it carries. It has no salubrious effects. In fact it’s a quid pro quo for sanity.

And yet I refuse to give up.

Words

I think that words are beautiful. The way they can shape your imagination, the way they can define your emotions, the way they can rule your thoughts-it’s quite incredible really. From something as simple as “hello” to something as profound as the “Great Perhaps” Francois Rabelais talks about, words can encompass all.

Words can make you shudder with fear. They can also make you an aficionado of something you never thought you’d enjoy. They might be manipulated into a philippic that destroys you. They can make you experience the fuzzy and insouciant feeling you get after eating a home cooked meal. They compose the power to express the strongest prurient emotions in the simplest of words. A word can show you an aspect of your personality that you weren’t aware of.

Words can also make you realize the sheer intensity of feelings. It just might be our door into other people’s minds. What they think? What they feel? How things influence them? After all, what’s so special about “I love you” that even though we know how the other person feels, we are still longing for them to voice it?

Words make us feel like we belong. Inking our thoughts in words, makes us realize that we’re not alone in this world and that someone somewhere just might understand what we’re trying to say instead of turning it into a homily. They serve to be spiritual emolument of sorts. It is through words that we can escape from ourselves and into a persona. In hopes of preventing ourselves from immuring into a prisoner of our own mind, we adapt the panache of a protagonist, or maybe wander into a matrix of a simple village to find solace from the daily hustle bustle of life, or maybe to a foray of Napoleon Bonaparte in anticipation of feeling alive just one more time.

Words aren’t restricted to one genre. No one browbeats them to stick to one language. The magnitude of a word is not commensurate in people. Words are like a diaphanous sheet of paper-so vivid and yet so vague.

Words are also abstract. There is no limit to the perception of a word. The word “red” can mean a billion things for a billion people ranging from love to blood to happiness to marriage and so on. Unlike numbers, where everything is simplified, words tend to complicate. You think of a sacrosanct word a certain way your whole life, scared that by thinking differently you might lead it to its funeral without any obsequies, until someone writes it in a different light and you’re left in awe. You’re amazed at its ingenuity. And then you experience an estranged state of being where your mind battles between the tendentious thoughts and the enlightened ideas. It’s like waking up the wrong side of the bed. You’re so accustomed to conformity that it takes you a while to readjust your brain and for it to realize the vicissitude.

But maybe you’re one of those lucky one’s who doesn’t need words. Maybe you can paint your heart out on a canvas. Or maybe play notes that replace this word vomit. Or maybe run miles until you know you have poured out your soul in sweat and blistered feet. Who knows how your brain functions. This may seem like complete rambling to you and might cause you to suffer a systemic mental breakdown. Or maybe the best thing you’ve ever heard.

Heights

Heights have been my greatest weakness; not because I am scared of falling down but because it gives me a strange extent of pride that allays my soul. Soaring above the clouds, flying freely as if I own the world further embellishes my delight. The sky becomes my haven and my wilderness. For I am an eagle and I fly above all. From the deep rooted secrets of treachery to the greatest feats of bravery; my eye views it all. I have vision and I despise those who are too weak to benefit from it. Just the other day, as I was on my custom flight, I witnessed an incident. A young seemingly felicitous girl, around the age of ten, short and skinny with long brown hair was dancing around in a yard with inhumane and inordinate celerity. She was dancing in her own little convivial world and I? I sat on the top branch of a tree watching her indigently. I sat there watching her for a few ephemeral seconds, waiting for her to glance at my illusory guise and run away. You see, normally people think of me as a bestial murderer who has the effrontery to be proud of his actions, but these misanthrope people are too blind to see my helplessness. Nevertheless that girl was different. No, it was not because of her astounding movements, but because she looked at me in the eye without wincing. I sat their staring at her, her me, and I waited. Waited for her to blink, but she didn't. She just stood there looking at me, not with a furtive glance but with an eye contact so pertinacious that I felt my eyes tear up but she didn't blink. I noticed something in her eyes; they were different than any other human being on this planet. It wasn't the garish blue color of her eyes. It wasn't the dark bags under her eyes either. It was a feeling of understanding. I felt like she had x-ray vision and could see through me as if my raiment of feathers was transparent. She could perceive my ambivalent thoughts as if it were a part of her own soul. Maybe that was the moment I realized she was just like me-alienated from her world. I did what I had not done to any human being before for bowing down to inhumane humanity was demurred by my coterie. I broke the eye contact first. I committed a felony. I was a culprit but such picayune crime felt mundane compared to the feeling that occupied me. For the first time since my existence I felt alive. I felt as if I had found a counterpart and I was understood for once. I had jettisoned my kind and I was content.

Yann Martel on Fear from Life of Pi

I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.

Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.