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.