It is taking everything I have not to fizzle and die right now. I am a 21 year old man, and yet my parents represent as much of an intrusive annoyance across the state of Michigan as they did when I was still living at home. Experience, yes, you’ve got it in spades, but what if the experience that fornication, drug abuse and hedonism entail isn’t what I’m looking for? Sod off.
I am on the brink of being done with college, and yet congratulations are meaningless because I feel that all I’ve been doing is what I’m supposed to be doing; passing classes, learning, growing. Should you be congratulated for doing what is ethically demanded of you? I think Cicero would disagree, hence so will I. Skeptic moderated stoicism seems to be the philosophy most cleanly associated with living a good life in the Aristotelian sense of the word. Maybe I should grow a beard too.
Once I’ve got my Ph.D. in hand, I suppose congratulations would be in order. By that time I will have exercised such copious ingenuity and creativity that I actually deserve some compliments from those around me. Maybe I’m becoming an arrogant prick, which are the kinds of people that Jesus does not love. But I just have to keep telling myself: two weeks until it’s all over. Then I can sit back and reflect on some of what just whizzed by me in four years’ time (and twenty-six thousand dollars later). But for the time being, I am content to stew in my acrimony and sink into a state I know I shouldn’t be in. It’s the picture of sin. Sometimes I see shades of comic-book mad scientists in me: the will to punish evil with knowledge, to curb blind strength beneath the yolk of wisdom. But it would all be a shambles anyway. I just can’t help but think that things would be better off if somebody put a bullet in the head of every strongman despot in Latin America and Africa… the reign of science begins.
