Absurdism and Other Stories
Keeping it hip
1.
I fell on my ass yesterday, again.
Well, more on my hip, I guess. Also my elbow.
I’m all bruised up and limping. It’s sort of a pain, but I’m making the most of it. Lots of old man noises and complaining, getting out of chores, and so on.
Living in Michigan is nice most of the time. I really do poorly in the heat, so don’t mind the whole “six months of winter and two of summer” thing. And I like the look of a snow-covered landscape, or a frozen river.
Check this out, for instance:
That water’s not frozen, but it almost looks like it kinda half is. You see how it’s folding in on itself? I just think that’s incredible. Only in MI!
The downside to this weather comes from poor architecture and planning and construction. Old sidewalks don’t drain well, and when the weather goes from above-freezing-and-rainy to below-freezing, a sheet of ice forms on them. And then sometimes it snows on top of that sheet, and a formidable trap is set.
This happened last weekend. I fell down twice on the same twenty minute walk on Sunday. At least the snow was there to cushion me.
Over the course of the week, I had a few close calls on the short walk from my car to the school building. Only once did I go down, but it wasn’t a real fall, just sort of a half-stagger to my knees.
And then yesterday.
Seemingly, most of the ice had melted or been salted away, and all the covering snow was gone. I guess I let my guard down.
Some lazy people and institutions apparently chose not to deal with their ice problem, though. So on some driveways and walkways, a clear crystalline layer remained.
This was the case at my school, in the courtyard, which I cut through on a daily basis for [somewhat confidential reasons], and which apparently drains very poorly.
I opened the door in something of a rush, didn’t look where I was stepping, and the next thing I knew I was flying, very briefly, before slamming down onto the icy concrete. It fucking hurt! And also was definitely seen by various passers-by in the halls, since the courtyard is cruelly surrounded by windows into the school.
I got up a bit bashfully and went on my way, then was ruthlessly made fun of for about an hour. And eventually I limped off to my next class.
2.
That class was Literature. We’re studying Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot.
We watched the movie, and I liked it. It was funny.
Now we’re reading the words and I just can’t quite get interested in it. Existentialism and absurdism and all that seem like they should appeal to me, given my propensity for faux-philosophical opinion writing. But they never have.
I tried to read Camus once, bought a bunch of his books. I only finished The Stranger. In all honesty, the sex(ish) scenes were the best part, and even they were painfully boring.
Next I tried reading The Myth of Sisyphus, but couldn’t get through more than about three pages. I just didn’t find it all that interesting.
It seems like a lot of the motivation for absurdist thinking stems from suicide. They think it’s strange how often people are killing themselves, that there must be some philosophical intrigue there.
I’m not sure there is. Suicide is a symptom of disease, illness. So we should be trying to treat the illnesses. Generally speaking, people aren’t killing themselves because they’re upset at the lack of meaning in their lives. They’re doing it because they have an untreated psychiatric disorder.
Philosophers like Camus and Sartre seemingly failed to realize this. I guess it wasn’t really their fault. Science has come a long way. But I think they probably should’ve noticed it even then.
Before either of the Frenchmen were born, Schopenhauer made a lot of very convincing1 philosophical arguments for meaninglessness and the awesomeness of committing suicide. But then he turned around and happily grew old and fat throwing lots of parties and fucking lots of younger women.
Meaning just doesn’t matter all that much to most people. Usually they create it for themselves through some religion—the God or the Civic kind—and even if they don’t, life tends still to find a way. The absurdists were trying to solve a problem that doesn’t quite exist, so Waiting for Godot doesn’t strike me as very deep. Just a little funny.
3.
My class after Literature is Global Politics. I tend to like global politics, but Global Politics is a joke. Especially now that our teacher’s been given something like six different administrative jobs to do, and taken over all the Economics class sections too.
So GloPo is less for learning theory or studying, and more for playing video games with Ansel, my speedcubing friend, and a few other guys.2
Ansel and I were not friends for a while, and periodically someone would tell me that I should be friends with him. This was during my totally anti-social time, and Ansel seemed to me like a pretty popular guy, so I mostly assumed that he couldn’t actually be interesting to be around, and never talked to him.
Then… I don’t exactly remember what happened… but last year, we started playing Sporcle together all the time.
Sporcle is trivia, more or less. Ansel is very good at geography, and I am very good at Seinfeld. We played a lot of Sporcle for a lot of months, and then we memorized 32 provinces of Vietnam a few weeks ago, and sorta called it a day.
Now we play lots of Geoguessr. He really wants us to learn the meta, but I want us to discover it ourselves. Unfortunately, if he just studies it on his own, he can get his way. So he’s starting to do that.
We’re pretty good at Geoguessr! I’m especially good at reading Cyrillic script in an obnoxious Slavic accent, then insisting that I can tell whether it’s Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, or Bulgarian, and getting it wrong every time. Ansel is good at road signs and license plates.
Once we get to GloPo, he’s usually been annoyed to his limit by my poor Geoguessing, so we play some Zero-G Gravity Swap Switch 3 game instead.3 And the game supports a lot of players, so usually we’re joined by two or three others with nothing better to do.
I am incredibly and unendingly bad at this game.
I have maybe the second-most experience with it at this point, behind Ansel himself, and still tend to finish last about every time. When we teach it to someone new, I can usually beat them in the first round or two, before I go back to losing consistently.
Why is this?
Maybe a lack of focus… but I can focus on my Minesweeping for hours on end.
Could also be poor dexterity… but, again, I can Minesweep pretty dexterously, even though there’s a bit more room for improvement here.
I think it’s timing.
The No-Gravity Zero Switch 3G Swap game is based completely on timing your Gravity Switch-Swap right, and I seem to always get it just wrong enough to fly off into the abyss. And I’m not really improving, even with a ton of practice. The time for Gravity Switch-Swapping comes, and I get a bit nervous, and then I get nervous about being nervous, and so on, and I fuck it up.
This isn’t a particularly strange pattern for me. But it’s strange that the Swap G 3D Gravity Switch game is the only time it’s coming out these days. The rest of my life has been feeling pretty zen.
4.
It’s been a while since I felt truly overwhelmed. I haven’t cried in maybe three years. I guess I’ve probably felt at least a bit overwhelmed between then and now, but not at all over the past few weeks.
Life is good. Senior year’s shaping up to be a breeze, oddly enough. The IB curriculum is supposed to get tough around now, you’re supposed to be stressed about exams. I’ve always been a decent test-taker, though, so I can’t really say I feel nervous.
This isn’t so normal for me!
Recall my neuroticism: it is high. I should be hitting snags and spiraling, but I’m not. I think it’s mostly that there are fewer snags out there than usual, not because I’ve become any better at handling them.
Still, it’s surreal, and almost a bit euphoric at times. I imagine I’ll come down from the high soon enough. These things don’t last.
This is my eighth straight day with a blog post, and some of them don’t even suck. That’s unheard of. You can check my archive—one mediocre piece every week and a half is the norm.
Then again, this one’s a little ramblier than usual. And missing some wit, I think. The end may be nigh.
Agh, and I am still shit at Minesweeper.
Lukethoughts
(Mistakes correspondent Luke Mathew’s serving up no fewer than four hot takes today in his second-ever column.)
“The concept of pop culture is so obtuse and the fact that we care whether Taylor [S]wift and [T]ravis [K]elce are getting married is fatuous and I use that wor[d] with specificity.” (Ed. note: Lucas is a poor speller and is using fatuous fatuously.)
“Me and Ari are going on a date tomorrow [today] and that is fun.” (Ed. note: It’s not a date, and will not be fun.)
“If you want any smoothie to taste good, just load honey in that shit.” (Ed. note: Folks, you heard it here first—sugar makes things taste better!)
“Ari Shtein should be Ari Schtine.” (Ed. note: No, it shouldn’t.)
Well, at least convincing to himself.
Generally, I do mean guys. I mean, we’re all crowding around a laptop to play some silly game. It’s a real testosterone-heavy environment.
I don’t have any actual idea what it’s called, I’m realizing.
Featured by name! How exciting. And I think you described me well: pretty popular, but surprisingly interesting. Maybe that would've been a good quote. Perhaps I can change it