Wednesday, September 30, 2009

I Knew I Should Have Majored in Psychology

Life sucks. I hurt. I am in pain. I am in pain and struggling to find my way out of it, and right now I’ll be damned if I could find my way out of a wet paper bag. I hate that life just keeps on moving, and I have no time to stop and work on me. There exists no time for myself, just to work on getting better, on being a better, healthier human being. I have to keep working. I have to keep parenting. I have to keep plodding along. When I come to my breaking point I break away, break free, sneak off and do something naughty with someone else who has reached their breaking point. My mind races. My body plods. My heart aches. I am not in a good place. And yet there is no time for me to take for myself. I need a sabbatical. I have no way of getting or funding such a thing. And so I write during the breaks, while reports run, when waiting for others to get back to me, whenever I can eek out a few minutes here or there.

But that first paragraph wasn’t the point of this post. That was merely an aside. What follows is the meat of the post, the entrée if you will.

I am a concrete person. I like tasks that can be handled by following steps one through ten to accomplish the outcome. This may be why I like math so much. All you have to do to solve a quadratic equation is follow the steps and voila there’s the answer. How frustrating that life isn’t like a quadratic equation. How frustrating that relationship problems aren’t solved like geometry problems. I can do Πr2 to get the area of a circle or 2Πr to get the circumference. I can find the length of any side of a right triangle if you give me the length of the other two sides simple as a2+b2=c2. I can do all those nifty math things! (I can even do much more complicated math things, but I don’t want to scare the non-mathematical among you so I stuck to the basics.) But of course to do all those nifty math things you just have to know the rules and follow the rules and it always works.

Life is not like math. You can follow all the rules and have things be anything from a complete disaster to a total success. You can follow none of the rules and have things be anything from a complete disaster to a total success. You can follow some of the rules some of the time and, whaddya know, have things be anything from a complete disaster to a total success. Or maybe I just don’t understand the rules, but I don’t think that’s it. I think there are just too many variables and too many random things and too much ambiguity to pin down a set of steps to follow to get to the end goal of a successful life. Shoot, I’ll bet you can’t find a dozen people who could give you the exact same definition of a successful life so there isn’t even really a clear result to shoot for!

Life is too messy. Life is ugly and doesn’t follow the rules, too much random shit.

You know how people always say about math, “Why do I have to learn this? I’ll never use it in the real world!” Well, they’re right. Real life doesn’t work anything like math. Why am I always an expert at the wrong thing?!?!?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm coming to you for help on my school work!! But I hear you... too bad life isn't like a quadratic equation... how easy it would be to solve. I' struggling right now, finding me. I was pretty sure I knew who "me" was... but since I haven't had the time, to do something as little as taking a nice, long hot shower.... its been pretty difficult... I have a hard time understanding what I feel...or why. I hate math, but if it really helped solving life... I would take the time to learn it in a second.

Sailor said...

It would certainly be tidier, if all of life were to work out as neatly as a math equation (thanks for keeping them on a level I comprehend, lol).

But, it would also be boring as all hell; I observed to a good friend, last night, as she was venting about how her husband is "wired differently" than she is-

Celebrate those differences, if you possibly can- would you *reallly* like it if we were all a+b=c?