Day Twenty One: A Strange Plateau?

Today I am in a rush to write these words, as I must write them before I head out for a night of adventure. The weekend nights are always the most exciting, as you never know exactly what might happen. For any given day, a given series of events seems to unfold, and there is not much surprise. That is why we say we live for the weekends.

The weekends are our wholly own, while the week is only tenously ours. A large portion of it is granted to some employer, and the rest might be spent in winding down preparing to grant the same employer yet another eight hours.

When you are out on the town, you hope and pray for adventure. As Vonnegut wrote about in his birthday present to himself, Breakfist of Champions, we seek in our own lives the excitment and tempo of a novel, the unexpected events, the build-up of tension, and the perfect cathartic release. Of course, life is not this way at all, it is merely hollowood and idealized novels that promote this untenable sequence of thoughts.

At some level, we all believe ourselves to be central, we all have an egocentric perspective from behind our own eyes. Our own thoughts are the only ones we have access to, and this biases us towards a playful pretending that the universe really does revolve around us; a soliplistic fantasy that conflicts with everyone else's fantasy.

So, often we are disappointed by our weekends, by our lives, that do not live up to some magical fairytale standard that is imprinted upon us by childhood stories. Some of us become jaded, and after questioning what this strange life is really all about, we reach a nihlstic answer: it is all meaningless. And yet, it is all that we have, all that we will ever have, so each moment is infinitely precious. It is a strange paradox, but one we live with every day, if only subconsciously.

As I head out the door from reality to fantasy, from weekday to weekend, from messy narrative to ideal plot, I hold on romantically to the promise of the unexpected adventures that await beyond.