“I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it”, said a very interesting man once.

Recently, my (now lamentably erstwhile) flat-mates and I were taking our usual one-in-the-ayem, fifteen-minute chat and hysterical laughter at unbelievably bad jokes (both unexcused by caffeine or nicotine ODs) breaks, and we caught ourselves having a serious discussion. Surprised because we had given those up a long time ago in the spirit of Christian sacrifice, and the interests of maintaining bonhomie, we nevertheless could not resist the lure of one last go at playing at being adults with serious life-decisions to make, and a whole huge world to alter and reforge in the melding fire of our beliefs. I wonder if that heady rush and feeling of power you get in the middle of a debate will ever go away, and also if that feeling explains why there are so many happy fanatics – it would be a permanent high to believe something so vehemently all the time, instead of only for the brief moment the thought formulates between your head and your lips. At least for me, once it leaves my mouth (or someone else’s) everything reduces itself to mere rhetoric. Good, effective, or otherwise, but irreducibly, irreversibly, rhetoric. Anyways, I had started it off (yea yea mea culpa) with arbidly asking if anyone else felt like they were still waiting for their real life to start happening – a life where you made choices for yourself, created your own options instead of choosing from the options made available to you by the world depending on your sex, class, age and nationality. This simple question seemed to require much further clarification. I didn’t mean choosing your major or your college or what job, or even between college and a job. I meant thinking hard about what you would really like to do with the brief period of time given you, not within these pre-defined set parameters, but without restricting yourself as you have been conditioned all you life to do. I mean if I really want to run a bar/café in some small mountain village in Chile, why does that immediately, even in one corner of my own head, become an absurd, laughable idea? Can I not mix drinks, brew coffee or mate, know Spanish, or get there? Which of these would prove an insurmountable obstacle? So how come I’m not already there? And when will whatever is stopping me cease to factor in my decisions? Anyways, what it boils down to, I suppose, is me asking the question (though I don’t know of whom exactly): IS THIS IT? IS THIS ALL? And also, while we’re at it, what is IT anyway? Well, now the questions are out there, and somehow, 42 just no longer does it for me as an answer…

"Enivrez Vous!", said Baudelaire, on wine or poetry or virtue...

Ah, bliss. Just finished Brave New World, and embarked on Motorcycle Diaries... ooh the forgotten pleasure of having the leisure to spend days and nights immersed in someone else's world or mind. I didn't realize till about a week ago just how much I had missed having this kind of control over my life - my time is completely mine to do with as I please, and my sweet, bewildered Dad doesn't know what to say when I sleep at five and wake up at two, and wander around with my nose permanently glued to a book. Its a relapse into a Condition they thought they had completley cured me of. I mean, there I was, for the last three years, out in the big, bad world all by myself, actually socialising and stuff (relatively speaking). But they failed to realise that it is moments or times like that which are my vacation from the serious daily business of ... well reading seems too inadequate a word... it doesn't quite express the all-consuming frenzy, the rapturous transportation, the ex-stasis - the out-of-body experience of it all. I suppose the little death could be a workable metaphor, the hormonal push towards; the biological drive for more than survival, for connection, affirmation of your status as self-described homo sapien sapiens; the relentless pursuit of that known and yet elusive and constantly surprising telos - which dangles at the tail of every venture, unseeable, impalpable, but reassuringly undeniable through precedent. A bitter-sweet end most of the time - one craves, simultaneously, the reprieve from something too demanding on our resources, while also dreading the end of feeling so intensely, painfully, real and alive. Oh, that this too too weary flesh...