Wednesday, November 10, 2004
weary Buddha
Well,
I had a real sense of weariness with the world today. Weariness combined with a pervasive feeling of dread, and the desire to fall asleep at random intervals.
I barely made it through half an hour of cardio at the gyme, and saw yet another anorexic girl -- very sad -- before hobbling back to the sub to finish my reading for today. I am totally inundated with crap I have to do for school, and yet I feel an odd sense of inertia. Professor Grover was talking tonight (and don't think that with a name like that he's not capable of serious discourse) about the cage of consumption, the fact that the real reason why people don't rise up in protest against the injustices of the world is because they've been comforted by toys like TVs and washing machines, and lots of food. "Liberalism is a gilded cage," as a poli sci prof I know once said. I don't normally agree with this statement, and most of the time I feel like an autonomous human being who is only deeply constrained in very rare instances, but today I was willing to agree with Buddha that life is suffering, and consumer goods are just temporary, soothing pain-killers.
Fortunately, my gloom was broken by a wonderful belated birthday present I received from my mom's best friend and her son, a friend of mine since birth. It was a cd with his and my pictures as babies on the label, and when I popped it in my computer it was a movie he had made of my party on Saturday night...the candle-blowing scene, of course. That was followed by a slide show (set to Louis Armstrong's 'What A Wonderful World') of pictures of our families from the time he and I were very small. Some things just can't be purchased. It was so so sweet, and I remembered how much people out there care for me, which makes it all worthwhile.
Sorry, Buddha, but I'm going to stay down here for a few more lifetimes.
Fare thee well.
-N
