Random Journal Page #2

from May 3, 2007

... can fight the system not by attempting to confront it directly (to take arms against a sea of troubles, which will end only in defeat) but by refusing to participate at all. Choosing not to participate (that is, refusing to perpetuate the system even to the extent that fighting it would) is the only adequate response.

If it’s adequate.

It could be that it’s inadequate even as it is simultaneously the only option that exists.

May 4, 2007

I get the whole senioritis thing. I do. But I don’t accept it as this kind of blanket nonsense excuse for whining inactivity. Again, if you choose to do nothing (with an hour, with a class, with an opportunity, with your entire damn life), then so be it: you’ve chosen to do nothing. Congratulations.

But, then, goddamnit, just shut up about it. Don’t whine. Don’t wheedle. Don’t whinge. Don’t offer excuses and piddly blah blah blah that you think rationalizes or excuses away your lack of action, your lack of engagement with what is in front of you.

Right?

As if I’m not guilty of this myself. But, I think I’m getting better at simply acknowledging when I’m wasting time, or doing nothing, or procrastinating, or attempting to foist responsibility rather than trying to…

***

That’s where the page ends, right before I started writing about Catch-22 again, which my last bunch of classes read a little later in the year than the current crop. This year, I managed to make it part of a trifecta of Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Hamlet. Which I like. Which makes sense to me.

That said, I found some humor in the page that flipping open the journal gave me. Not in what was said, necessarily, but just in that awful, self-serving, ultimately whiney complaint about, yes, whining. Humor of the not-funny variety.

Particularly not-funny, I guess, in light of how I stayed up all night Sunday working on my National Board entries, stayed home from school on Monday to continue working on those same entries, and still would have failed to meet the deadline if the local post office didn’t have one of those nifty automated package mailing machines that allowed me to postmark my box o’ procrastination at 7:43 on Monday night and still have it count as March 31. Much of which could have been avoided by working as much on it throughout the year as I should have, spreading the hours out over several months rather than into two days of Spring Break and the 48 hours before it was due.