I will finish this book, I swear.

On and off I've been reading a gargantuan, 1079 page book titled Infinite Jest by William Foster Wallace. I won't go into details as to what the book is about. It would be way too difficult. I came across a passage where an older man is talking to a younger boy. Wallace is known for his rapid-fire dialogue without any punctuation or paragraphing. It is highly organic, challenging, and immensely engulfing. 

The dialogue takes place, i presume, between a boy and is father. The father introduces to the boy a tennis ball. He talks about how this immaculate and inanimate object can make you the best tennis player in the world. How that tennis ball can be used so that it will be the definitive doom or glory of your career. How that tennis ball can, essentially, make or break you.
So I thought.
How many objects do make or break me in my life? Do I place trust in immaculate and lifeless objects that can cause the rise or demise in my life?  I think this factor plays into many aspects of life. Especially today. We trust our cars to get us from place to place safely and in a timely fashion. We place trust in our phones (some people more so than others) to relay fast texts and to run business and be reliable. I think this sense of trust fosters dependency on such immaculate and lifeless objects.
Which made me think further.
Can I destroy that dependency and free myself from any trust in any useess object except for myself, my family, my friends? I wondered whether or not this dependency is healthy or not to begin with.. Dependency can turn to addiction, as an addiction to phones and constantly checking them rapidly enters the DSM as a possible disease.  

$60,000 a year

When I say a little, I mean a lot. Being a senior in high school, a certain undeniable anxiety is rising in the depths of my cerebral cortex as I think about college. Many pieces of adulthood are coming together as the high school safety net slowly drifts away, one of them being college.
Hyped-up since (not even kidding) 5th grade, college became a seemingly attainable-by-all pedestal of gilded goodness that will be the door-opener for seemingly infinite things I can become afterwards.

hold on

what

?

5th grade, yeah. I remember my elementary school taking part in a program that wanted to make every child college bound. A form of total brainwash if you ask me. It's called "no-excuses university". When I look back at it I laugh, I laugh sardonically at the complete idiocy of this concept. My theory (largely unproven and in dire need of research) is that the 2 to 4 year public post-high school institutions began to suffer financially at/around that time. 2006, or so. Thus, they needed the next few generations to boost up the finances through attendance while at the same time, due to the economy and the federal government's cut to fund education, much of the collegiate revenue had to have a more concrete source. That source is this generation, my generation that will get totaled with student loans without much of a shot at an immediate post college job. With tuition for most schools with a good repertoire reaching the upper 20 to 30 thousand per year, it is inevitable that at some point, the heads of the "spam-your-mailbox-with-college-stuff-hoping-we-can-get-your-money" committee needed that extra revenue and needed to begin the mindset early.
In a little flashback, I remember that my 5th grade room adopted Michigan State University as "our" university. We had a great time looking up what it's all about, the campus, the sports, the Spartans, and even pen-pal'ing with some of MSU's students. Not knowing squat about how a university works, I just moseyed with the flow. I moseyed so hard that the idea of a university/college is engrained into my cerebrum, a hot-iron brand that reminds me that anything other than college after high school is petty and unrealistic and wont result in a job or something that I can live off of.
We were brainwashed and we didn't know any better.
Its an awful idea to start college at such an early age as that because grasping such a concept was folly and widely misunderstood among myself and many of my peers.
College talk does a great job in surmising anything else that I could pursue after high school. It's too late for that, though. Way too late.
Someone somewhere is rolling in the g's that we so painfully hand in when making last month's student loan payment.
And it will only get worse.
By the time today's 1st graders become seniors in 11 years, the average university will cost anywhere between 40-60 THOUSAND dollars give or take the inflation. (data taken form massmutual.com in their estimating college costs section)
60 grand for one year? Take me out. Makes me not want to have kids. Makes me glad Im going to college for 20 grand a year.
60,000... Think about it.

Ever listen to Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve? It's okay.

It seems as though my last post hinted at the idea that there is some way to live our lives right.  I don't know if there is. It's so hard to explain to yourself that life is just as good or as bad as you make it. Living life on your own terms is the best thing you can do and try as hard as possible to relate it to someone else is who, you think, is living it better than you. Sure, some may find more success than others, some just out of pure luck, but there is always something to enjoy out there. There is always something to feel passionate about, something to pursue. Something that brings you the peace of mind.
As I said before, it's important to not compare your own life to someone else's. In today's day and age, it's becoming really hard not to get sucked up in other's petty facebook, twitter, instagram etc updates that that comparison between our lives and that of our friends is inevitable and often done subconsciously. How often do we see a status that gets too much undeserved attention. We see the "likes", the wonderful comments and we think "Why don't I get that attention?" then we try harder and harder to get that attention, posting pictures, posting statuses in order to get that piece of self-righteous attention. We compare our lives to those who, by evidence of facebook, are living their lives better than us. Facebook is turning us back to self-conscious, attention hogging, pleading, pouting, three year olds. Our statuses are the cry for attention as we hope they get as many thumbs up or as many comments as possible.
On the complete flip-side, the reality shows on tv (MTV, wft?) are getting consistently more bizzare. The reason for that is for the viewers to think "Hey, at least I'm not living my life like that teenager who got knocked up who's getting dumped by her baby-daddy". This is another medium through which we can compare our lives and see whether or not we're living them right.

Die American Dream.

Composed mostly of subconscious absent-minded late-night backlashes, this blog is pretty much an experiment for me. This isn't really an insight to my life but rather a cry of help. See what I did there? It's not a cry for help. It's a cry of help. I'm totally against this whole thing of the internet being someone's "virtual diary". But then again, what am I doing here right?  I'll try to expand upon the various things that bother me in my life (how society, family, relationships etc. are ran) and hopefully find some common ground with whoever might stumble upon this blog one day. If anybody.

I guess the only important thing to know is that I'm 18 and I'm a senior in high school who's slowly but surely realizing I'm not really up to par with my fellow classmates or performing up to my parents expectations. Now, granted, my parents are first-gen immigrants from Poland which make me a first gen Poland-born immigrant as well. So the expectations are already sky-high. Going to college, getting a good job, living that American dream. Some people cringe at the idea of the American Dream because it has been overly analyzed as the sole thing that gets illegal immigrant to come into the united states. I'm not illegal, no worries. But the idea of the American Dream has somehow become bloated. A sort of up in the sky idea whose value has diminished over the years. At least my generation sees it that way. My girlfriend recently gave me the business about that exact idea. I told her, as we were neck deep in the "oh what are we going to do after high school?" talk, that I really DO want a well paying job, a good education, and that one day i'll have a family and be able to be a good father and a good husband. Her immediate reply was a scolding "Oh, so you want the American dream?". People, what is wrong with this idea? Did I go wrong? Did I offend anyone by saying that I want a good job and a house and a car and a wife and kids? I'm pretty sure that most of the males in my generation tend to think the same, just without the American Dream label. So why would she mention that? Has the American Dream become too weak and too petty? Is there something OTHER than the American Dream to actually pursue?

Answer is, there isn't.

This kind of veers into the next portion of my train of thought. What actually IS there to pursue other than college? Once you're done with high school, then what? College, right? Is there any other option? Some adults out there might say "oh yeah there's trade school, go straight for a job" but like... Is there really anything else? Has our society devolved into an overly simplistic future, making every child college bound since kindergarten? How fucked up is that? Engraving that sort of fake confidence in every child, making it think that college is just another step in the future while every other option in life after high school is suppressed. My girlfriend and I were walking in Chicago one day in the summer and we were overhearing a conversation that was happening between a couple with their newborn child and (what I assumed to be) a family friend. They were chit-chatting about schooling and the family friend asked the infant "Where are you going to go to college?". Granted, I didn't hear the whole conversation. But why the hell would you even look THAT far into the future for an infant child who cares about nothing more than getting fed and the comfort of its mothers and fathers care? My girlfriend and I looked at each other in complete disbelief.

It's like we're taught to live forever in the future. There will always be something good in the future while never really taking the present into account and then when we're old enough to realize how much of our time we spent worrying about the future, we regret never taking a step back, look at our lives, and just live for the now. Sure, this is starting to sound like something from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" but it's incredibly relevant as to how we ought to live. Life does move too fast. When you have too much going on, you feel like you're missing out on too much. When you have nothing going on, you feel like you're missing out as well. I don't know if there exists a happy medium between the two. Maybe that's the beauty of finally figuring out life, is that balance between what we have to do and what actually makes us happy.

I've been working as a cashier at a Polish Deli for over a year and I completely regret ever having the concept of money introduced to me. Paycheck after paycheck, I've become a slave to the corporation, the dollar sign is my pimp, and i'm it's overused bitch. Money never should have been invented, ever. I need the money to do cool stuff, to go places to save up for... for what? Wait do I really need it? I face this exact same question every day and I can't ever come up with an answer. Do I really need all of that material shit to feel sane? To feel like i'm a part of something greater when I buy that new whatever? Why is it that I can't relinquish myself from society, loosen its noose that's tightening around my neck, kick away the stand that is slowly slipping away, and pull a Chris McCandless. I'd love to just venture out into the wild and live as a hobo, potentially, and I'd love to just meet people, live off of their kindness, help them with whatever job they might have me do for no pay and just be in their company for as long as they need me. I'd love to go coast to coast. See things and experience things wildly, like the human was intended to live.

Part of me really believes that the human wasn't meant to be domesticated at all. We were wild and savage. Not dormant and working a dead end job and look at the ever faded future for who knows how long before we realize how much of the present we've actually missed.


I dunno. This is just a try. More posts soon to come, I guess.