Out Of The Trap And After The Carrot

Well kids, we all know that nothing ever turns out the way we plan it; prime examples include Nick Donato's broken arm, my own higher education career, and who could forget the escape to the islands in Dawn of the Dead? You could cull countless examples from movies, literature, television shows, and certainly your own personal experiences, but dwelling on them would be needless. We've already been over the ramifications of the Cosmic Mouse Trap; the question, then, is: what do you do once you've gotten yourself out of the trap? The answer lies in following what I like to call the Cosmic Carrot.

What is the Cosmic Carrot, you ask? Well, in a word, happiness. You see, after a lot of thinking and one epiphanous shower (the greatest revelations are always given through interaction with water somehow) I realized something about happiness. Happiness is not, as people commonly think, a state of being, but rather a goal to be achieved, with one minor caveat: it is largely unachievable. Thus, happiness is like the carrot laid out before us, enticing us to trot along the path of life like a horse in hopes of one day devouring that carrot. It's not about reaching the carrot; realistically, that's everyone's objective, and that's as it should be. But the main purpose of the carrot itself is not to be eaten. It exists simply to motivate us to keep going.

So why is happiness a virtually unattainable goal? In order to answer that question, we have to look at what happiness is and where it comes from. Bear in mind, I'm not saying that you can never be happy. People are often happy at any given point in time, just as people are often warm at any given point in time. The problem is that happiness, like warmness, fluctuates with the temperature of the times. I'm willing to bet that most people never experience a longstanding sense of happiness, for one simple reason. Happiness is achieved through obtaining what you want, whether that comes from circumstances, people, objects, accomplishments, etc. I'm sure you're familiar with the phrase "the grass is always greener on the other side." If you don't have it, you want it, simply because you don't have it. My boy Teddy Geiger once said "you always want what you can't have," which is an apt way of putting it. I'd actually take that one step further, and say you only want what you can't have (which, in fact, is why I think the most sought-after girls seem to be single more often than not, but that's a whole separate issue). To extrapolate, not only do you want it if you don't have it, but you don't want it if you do have it. Want, by definition, is a state of pursuit, so once you've acquired whatever it is you're trying to obtain, how can you "want" it any longer? It's already yours. Thus, you can never be in possession of what it is you want, and if whatever you want is always out of reach, happiness really is never completely achievable.

Now that we've established that happiness is essentially an illusory bribe designed to propel us forward, what's to stop us from being completely miserable all the time? Well, the answer here is actually based on the premise of wanting. The way I see it, to want is a good thing, as long as the possibility of getting what you want is plausible. But like I said, once you get it, it's no longer an issue of "wanting" but an issue of "having." And soon, once you have that thing, it either passes away or you no longer want it, leaving you to move on to something else... and that's precisely the answer to the question posed at the beginning of the paragraph. It's not having the things you want, or even necessarily getting them that makes you happy. What makes you happy is knowing that you will or might have them in the future. Happiness is all about having something to look forward to, something that you can look to and say "things aren't great right now, but whenever this happens/I get that thing, things will be better." It's about having something to hope for, whether that hope is unfounded or not (which is why I've come to believe that false hope is better than none at all). Just like the horse and his carrot, it's about what's in front of you, not what you've currently got. If you get the carrot, you don't need to chase it anymore, so you stop moving. If there is no carrot, what's the motivation for moving at all?

As an application to my own personal experience, I always looked forward to going back to school at the end of summer, and I realized a while back that I would no longer be able to look forward to that anymore, which was quite a downer, I must admit. I figured I would take solace in the fact that I'd probably have a lot more free time in the near future, not realizing that I was doing exactly what I'm describing in this paragraph. And then, the other day it hit me. For the last week or two, since I finished working on those dance DVDs that had been occupying a lot of my time, I hadn't been doing much of anything. I would get up, eat, watch TV, sit on my bed and beebop around the internet, watch a movie, etc. But to be honest, I wasn't really having all that great of a time, which didn't make much sense to me, because I had the opportunity that I've always wanted... lots of free time and no real responsibility. I felt stuck, and I lacked the motivation to really do anything about it. I was a horse with no carrot. Then, the other day, whilst participating in an activity I would normally hate, I found myself feeling more alive than I have in a while. I was helping my dad move boxes from our shed to our driveway for a garage sale we're having this weekend, and though it wasn't much fun, I thought about how I wanted to be finished so I could go play the computer game I've been absorbed in for the past few days. And then it struck me like a 2x4 to the forehead. I wasn't exactly happy while I was working, but I had something to look forward to at the end of the work, which is what made it bearable. That's how you keep yourself from being miserable, even in the face of adverse circumstances... by having a light at the end of the tunnel, or a carrot that you can chase after.

The bigger epiphany hit me, like I said, while I was in the shower the other day. For a while now, I've been wondering what to do with my life. Up till now, school is the only thing I've ever known, and I wasn't ready to get a job, exactly. I was too hung up on getting a job that would make me "happy," doing something that I would enjoy, finding my purpose in life, that kind of thing. My parents have, for quite some time, wanted me to take a job that I don't think I would enjoy very much, and I've been fighting it every step of the way, not wanting to consign my life to going to work every day at a job that I can't stand. But in the shower, I finally put everything that I've discussed already in this blog together for myself, and realized that, for lack of any better idea, I should just take that job. If I sit around waiting forever, I'll just be in the same place I am right now: nowhere, with nothing to look forward to. But if I take that job, even if it doesn't ever really amount to anything, and even if I hate it (in fact, especially if I hate it), I will, at the very least, be able to look forward to being done for the day. Sure, things aren't turning out how I'd really like them to, but that small consolation is all I really need to maintain day-to-day happiness. Suffice it to say I find it very clever that the founding fathers included the "pursuit of happiness" as an inalienable right. You can't guarantee that everyone has what they want, but you can guarantee them something to want in the first place.

The bottom line is it's really all about is playing with the hand you're dealt, as they say. If you find yourself in the Cosmic Mouse Trap, take it from me: stop dwelling on how the trap has stunted your progress, take a good hard look at your surroundings, and start looking for the carrot again, in whatever form it may come, even if it's pointing you in a different direction than you originally intended to go. Just catching sight of the Cosmic Carrot may be enough to get you out of the trap.

Bonus Features On A Blog? Innovative!

Every time I log into the Blogger dashboard, it tells me how many posts I have, but it also includes unpublished drafts in that number, so I know that I don't actually have that many posts available for viewing on my blog. Today, I decided to check and see how many unpublished drafts I actually have, and upon inspection, I concluded that the total is four. I was about to delete these drafts so the post count upon login would no longer be lying to me, but I started going through them to see what I had written. I then realized that it would be a terrible shame to throw away all that work just because each draft belonged to an overarching idea or theme that I ultimately decided against using for whatever reason, and thus, today's blog idea was born. The following is a collection of the material that I opted not to use, the "deleted scenes," if you will, and frankly, I don't even remember what I was talking about when I initially wrote most of it, so if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, that's why. This isn't going to be a terribly well thought-out blog, just a collection of some of the unwritten things that I was thinking during the Spring 2009 semester at Liberty. For my small contingency of readers, hopefully you'll enjoy it.

The first entry in my deleted scenes blog came from a draft entitled "If You Give A Grad Student A Cookie..." that I had written on April 21, 2009:

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day,

Profound. I can't imagine why I didn't follow this up with anything else at all. I believe I was about to go on a rant about how I hate hearing that breakfast "jump-starts your metabolism," because that phrase is so dang hackneyed, but I guess I didn't have the heart. Also, I believe this was written the day after one of my graduate work-induced meltdowns, during which the cookies I had procured from the Clubhouse on the previous night basically preserved my sanity, so I think that's the connection to the cookie mentioned in the title. This nice girl who worked at the grill had given the cookies to me... I wish I could remember her name... oh well. I'm sure she's doing just fine for herself these days.

The next entry comes from a draft titled "Reflections on an Easter Weekend." If you take note, this phrase is properly capitalized in accordance with the rules for such things, so this must have been written before I adopted the practice of disregarding English rules and capitalizing every word of my titles no matter what. I don't know when I started doing that, but it must have been before April 13, 2009:

You may have noticed that every Wednesday for the last three weeks, I've posted a new blog. Well, this week I'll probably be too busy on Wednesday night to get around to that (ah grad school, how I love thee), so I figured I'd put this up tonight to tide my regular readers over for the week. I don't have anything very insightful or even of real significance to say; if you haven't noticed, usually my inspiration comes from frustrating interactions with females, and most of the girls I hang out with on a regular basis have been out of town for Easter, so I haven't really seen them since Thursday. At any rate, even though I don't have any kind of grandiose overarching point, I do have an urge to just sit and throw down some of the stuff that's been swimming around in my head the past few days.

Let's start with the Easter holiday that has erroneously been dubbed "Easter Break" at Liberty University. First of all, it's not a "break." It's a day off. One freaking day off. We get Monday off (and, for the record, this was a tradition enacted in 2007; prior to that year we Liberty students got no days off for Easter), and people commonly wonder why we get the Monday after Easter off as opposed to Good Friday. The answer is simple: having Monday off, everyone who went home for Easter can stay through the entirety of Easter Sunday and then leave on Monday. This brings me to my second point, which is actually a question: why would you want to leave Liberty at Easter time? I understand that Easter is an important holiday for Christians and that people like to spend it with their families (I too enjoy Easter with my family, when I'm already home), but in all honesty, Easter weekend is traditionally one of the best weekends of the year at Liberty. It makes absolutely no sense to me to spend money to go home so you can miss out on the experience. Maybe the experience isn't the same for everyone, maybe it's just my particular group of friends and the way we celebrate that makes it so awesome. I don't know, I suppose this particular dead horse has already received a sound beating, so I will go no further, I guess I just feel sorry for everyone who misses out on the Easter festivities held by those of us carrying on the 22-3 Legacy.

Speaking of Easter festivities, this year was no exception to the general rule of awesomeness. For starters, Ryan came up from Florida, and I haven't seen Ryan since early December, so it's been over four months. Andrew Clark has been back from Ohio for the last two weeks, so he was here to join in the fun. Danny Latin, Aaron Crawford, and I are all still students at Liberty, so the only people missing from the Golden Age of 22-3 were Jamie and Sean, both of whom are fully entrenched in the working world now.

As you can see, even then I acknowledged the tribulations of dealing with women as the lifeblood of my blogging career, and I recall being very annoyed that they all bailed on us for Easter, but I think just the sheer enormity of the task of describing what happened that weekend deterred me from finishing; either that or something Ian and Milton were doing in the room distracted me and I never got back to it.

The next excerpt truly is a bit off the cutting room floor, as it's part of an early version of the post I ended up writing about the differences between the worldviews of the Watchmen characters Rorschach and The Comedian. While I ultimately took a different approach to the post as a whole than the one I had chosen upon starting it, this small bit, written on March 29, 09, is still applicable:

On the ride back from lunch today, after considering the number of cars the average American family has (which, in my estimation, is roughly one per person and, in my mind, is also absolutely ridiculous), I noted an exchange from Watchmen, wherein Nite Owl wonders aloud what happened to the American Dream, and The Comedian responds, in the face of a chaotic New York cityscape, "It came true. You're looking at it." Following this seemingly random (but actually calculated) excerpt, one of the females in the car asked who spoke that particular line, and after I told her, the other female (who had seen the movie) said "Ooh, he was AWFUL! I didn't like him!" I briefly described The Comedian's worldview, and after hearing my description, the first girl said "That's a sad way to look at life. It sounds a lot like the way Bill looks at it."

My original introduction for this post felt clunky and much too direct for my liking, which is why I decided to postpone the idea until I had something better to go on, and I'm glad I did.

Speaking of directness though, I must have been following the same line of thinking that I espoused in this draft, the last of the deleted scenes:

A brief note on subtlety: if you want to get a message across, don't use it. I've found that people often don't want to think too much (which, I believe, is why some people don't like masterpieces like Watchmen or the Matrix Trilogy). As a result, they may hear exactly what it is you're saying, but won't understand precisely what you mean. I'm a big fan of ambiguity and double entendres used in such a manner that your words may mean more than just what they say. Unfortunately, sometimes the only way to make people understand what you're getting at is to bash them over the skull with it.

Interestingly, that short paragraph serves as a surprisingly appropriate appetizer for the main course du jour. Since I just stated that subtlety is generally lost on the masses, I'm gonna throw this out there for everyone to read, plain and simple: what I initially meant in that first paragraph was that sometimes I make statements, comments, remarks, references, etc., and the real meaning goes unnoticed by most people. Then I realized that I've got a perfect case of dual meaning going on here,

And I guess I just stopped mid-thought right there, but the draft continues for one more line after that, probably because I wanted to throw down a thought that I didn't want to forget (I do this often while I'm composing blogs):

Speaking of oblivious people, I've got another subject to address:

My guess is that I was gonna go off on the general lack of perception that girls seem to show, although that generality was more than likely inspired by a singular source. Unfortunately, I no longer remember the specifics, nor do I remember exactly why I titled it "Hey Kid, You'll Never Live This Down." What I do know is that the title is taken from a line in the Fall Out Boy song "A Little Less Sixteen Candles, A Little More Touch Me." I think the significance of the title was meant to be discovered upon examination of the song; I do know the line that follows that particular one had special significance, and that the reason I chose this line for the title was multifaceted, a common habit of mine. But like I said, I can't remember exactly what I meant when I wrote it. I think I mentioned dual meanings at the end of the second paragraph for that precise reason. Apparently, I also wrote this draft on March 29, although it was probably some time after midnight the night before I wrote the other draft.

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, my unpublished material from Spring 09, foisted upon the world of the internet for all to see and probably for two or three to read. But that's okay, at the very least a few people will (hopefully) get something out of this, and my dashboard will henceforth reflect an accurate post count.

This Is What Dreams Are Made Of

Okay, so last night I had one of the weirdest dreams I've had in a while. Of course, weird dreams are commonplace, and the events in the dreams were plenty bizarre, but one of the strangest things about it was that it was one of the most linear dreams I've had in recent memory. Thus, tonight, instead of my usual blogging fare, I'm going to transcribe the events of this dream for you, and hopefully you'll find it at least marginally entertaining.

At the start of the dream, I was on my way to Williamsport, PA for the Little League World Series with my brothers Chris and Ned and the rest of the Colonie Little League crew. We stopped about halfway through our journey and got out of our cars and ventured off into the woods to stretch our legs a bit. I was wandering around, and I got separated from everyone else and ultimately lost in the woods. When I finally met up with some other people (they were nameless and faceless and didn't play much of a part in the rest of the dream), they told me that while I had been lost, the world had been taken over by an evil European noble of sorts, and that he was building concentration camps all over the country in which to torture and kill people. I looked around and saw that a large fence had been erected around the forest in which I had found myself, and knew that I was trapped.

Some time passed (I don't know how much, but it seemed to be several days, at least), and after a while a new group of people that had been rounded up by the evil noble's forces were dumped off in my little area of the camp. These people were a group of five Asian midgets, all of whom were female, except for one male who looked just like the puppet version of Kim Jong-il from Team America: World Police. At first they tore wildly around the camp, acting much like ill-behaved five year olds on sugar highs (or Gremlins) and basically getting on everyone's nerves, so I took it upon myself to get them to calm down. This was no small feat, but eventually, over the course of a week or so, I got them to calm down and I became friends with the little Asians.

Another member in the camp who I found to be a surprisingly nice person was the Grinch. Not the cartoon Grinch, but Jim Carrey's Grinch. Unfortunately, though we got along very well, one day his number was up, and he was taken off by the guards to be tortured and executed. At that point, I knew we had to try to escape. I didn't just want to wait around until it was my time to be killed. It was then that Miley Cyrus and I realized that a contraption that the guards had been using as a snow plow was actually an old medieval style catapult. The two of us found a portion of the fence that was covered in plastic wrap at the bottom and tore a small hole in it. The hole was maybe five inches in diameter, but we both somehow managed to squeeze through it anyway, and when we got through the bottom of the fence, we each got on one side of the plow/catapult and began to push it along the ground, scraping the bottom of the fence along its length in such a manner that it caused the fence to become uprooted. We were somehow doing this very stealthily, and destroying large portions of the fence without the guards noticing.

We worked our way, slowly, toward the bad guy's headquarters, and once we got to the very edge of the wall there, we stopped. We saw Revolutionary War-era British soldiers, and knew that these were the bad guy's personal guards, and we didn't want to alert their attention, so we just kind of snuck around a little bit, finding out as much as we could about the place. We noted that the bad guy had a female sidekick, and I can only describe her as looking like the picture on the "Blood Cultist" Magic card (which you can see here). The two of them were designing a new type of torturous execution device. It was a giant wooden chair, the kind with vertical slats on the back, that was wide enough to seat three people, except it was made out of metal and had a long handle protruding from the back. It worked like this: three people would be tied up and seated on the chair, while the chair was pushed ever so slowly toward a giant fire, until all the people on the chair were eventually in the fire burning to death. This contraption was called the "Butter Burner." I heard them discussing plans to put us in it, so we hastily left that place.

Before we left the complex, however, I managed to find a book that had background information on the five Asian midgets that had been placed in our sector of the camp. As it turned out, they were all criminals of some sort. One of the females was a cannibal, and the male was a pedophile, but those are the only two I remember. At any rate, I figured their criminal history could be useful in staging an uprising at the camp, so I was delighted to find this information out. Once we got back to our area of the camp, I was surprised to find the Grinch waiting for us. He was in rough shape, and his entire body had been shaven, so instead of his signature pyramidal hairdo, all he had was a fuzzy green buzz cut. He also had stitches on his face. I asked him what had happened, how he had survived, and he told me that they beat him up, sewed a pineapple to his face, and then left him for dead. He pretended to die, and then once the guards left, he ripped the pineapple off his face and made his way back to the camp proper. I told him of our plans to basically riot and escape, and he said that since they thought he was dead, he could use the element of surprise to help us out.

At that point, I went over to Miley and told her it was time to really start destroying the place. We grabbed the plow/catapult, and started crashing around with it, tearing down as much of the fences as we could and not worrying about whether or not we were making too much noise. I had hoped that we would be able to get to the main complex and destroy it before we were caught, but the guards captured us just outside of it and took us into the inner chamber. The bad guy then made some kind of speech about how it was our turn to die, and they began preparing to strap us into the Butter Burner. I was terrified. Then, from behind a pillar, the Grinch suddenly sprang out, grabbed the bad guy by the head, and bashed his skull repeatedly against the pillar until he was dead. The guards were startled, and ran toward the Grinch without thinking about us. I immediately jumped up, grabbed the Blood Cultist Lady's head, and bashed it violently against another pillar until she was dead as well. Meanwhile, the Grinch and Miley Cyrus were disposing of the guards in the same fashion. Soon, we were all killing the guards and everyone in the place was making a break for it, and then I woke up.

So that's it. If anyone out there can interpret dreams, I'd be interested to hear theories, because that was just too bizarre. I hope you enjoyed this little slice of my subconscious.