Butterflies and Hurricanes

There’s nothing in particular that I want to write about. I just felt like writing. It’s comforting. To open up this little box and observe what unfurls in front of me. It rained today. After long. I was in the editing studio working on an assignment, and when I stepped out, the gust of wind and the smell of wet mud filled my senses. It was like a spell. I was just so happy. I walked all the way to the photocopy shop with a stupid grin plastered on my face. I just love this place so much. 

We have this professor teaching us Business Journalism these days, and he is so good that none of us mind spending our entire evenings sitting in a classroom listening to him. He discussed the financial crisis of 2008, he talked about its aftermath, and then he played a game with us, where we all were the head of the Federal Reserve and had to control the economic condition of America. I wish all the teachers in the world were like him. People would grow up smarter then. I wish I had better teachers in school. I did, but nothing ever interested me apart from stories. Biology and Geography to an extent, but I never spent as much time trying to understand those as I did with my nose etched deep between the pages of my English literature textbooks.

I watched the first episode of True Detective. There’s something Matthew McCanoughey says which caught my attention. “Human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labour under the illusion of having a self. The secretion of sensory experience and feeling programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody. When in fact, we are nobody. Maybe the honourable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing. Walk hand-in-hand into extinction.”

That’s probably a pessimistic, awful thing to say to anybody. But god, I love it. I just love it when somebody tries to think beyond what we are supposed to do. What we are taught to do. What we are made to do. I can’t believe people have stopped asking questions. They do not want to know things which are beyond their comprehension. Which reminds me, I also watched Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. Linklater is the same guy who created Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight. Sheer brilliance.

Anyway, so I love him because he’s constantly asking all these questions in his films. Waking Life is about a boy who is lucid dreaming, and he meets all these people and talks to them about existence, science, the universe, religion and other such things. Things that people, for some reason, don’t discuss in everyday life. They just talk about superficial everyday issues. Which is also fine, but have you noticed how people usually seem to talk nonsense most of the time?

I didn’t even understand half the things they were trying to explain in the movie. And I know, I know, people usually roll their eyes and advise me not to think so much and to ‘go with the flow.’ But, I just don’t buy it. The whole ‘living’ thing. If I had a choice, I would probably not even do it. There’s got to be bigger plan, but that is not enough and it doesn’t even matter because we are here for like a fleeting second. We are here completing our time, trying to get by and salvage some happiness for ourselves. Which is fine, but it just makes me so restless.

There was a scene in the movie where a girl bumps into the guy for less than a second, and they apologize and start walking away, and then she stops him and says, “Hey. Could we do that again? I know we haven’t met, but I don’t want to be an ant. You know? I mean, it’s like we go through life with our antennas bouncing off one another, continously on ant autopilot, with nothing really human required of us. Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there. All action basically for survival. All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along in an efficient, polite manner. “Here’s your change.” “Paper or plastic?’ “Credit or debit?” “You want ketchup with that?” I don’t want a straw. I want real human moments. I want to see you. I want you to see me. I don’t want to give that up. I don’t want to be ant, you know?”