Frustrated: Part II

I find that I’m up late worrying about finances and my future. Not the things that I should personally value, I worry about the things that society values. I’ve been influenced, they got me, and whatever way we choose to interpret the messages we receive; choice itself affects us. We’re numb, to the extreme point where emotions in a TV show actually shake us up a bit, because we as people don’t readily express emotions to that extent. Not properly at least, we express emotion by giving things. Cards are a good example. The writing on cards is always incredibly touching because some asshole working for Hallmark was able to come up with something so genuinely corny that you feel bad if you read it and can’t think of anyone you know who it might pertain to.

We don’t have feelings really. I am acutely aware of when I’m a little afraid or stressed, I know when I’m in a good mood or a bad one, I can feel the endorphins kick in after a workout when I start telling a few more jokes, or when I’m in a moment and there is truly nowhere else I’d rather be. Happiness, though, seems to have become the absence of misery, like when you’re warm enough that you’re not uncomfortably cold, or cold enough that you’re not sweating profusely. I’m in a state of pure adulation with an AC unit that alleviates some of the humidity that had me sitting in ball soup all last summer. Satisfaction is when the tickle in my throat goes away; it is that there is nothing to be noticed. When the fan blade in the compressor of my off-level refrigerator isn’t clicking loudly and stopping the Tylenol PM I just took from allowing me to get a good night’s rest, that’s contentment.

I know anger, because I’m angry at people on the sidewalk who can’t walk in a straight line. Angry at groups of people who have no regard for fellow pedestrians and spread out so that you either walk begrudgingly behind them at their speed or inelegantly wrap yourself around a sign, squeeze your way through some small person-sized gap, or speed up like the power walkers with those ridiculous ski poles to get around them. Do you really need a couple of poles to balance yourself on the sidewalk? Are you really walking that fast? That’s not the point; the point is that the people suck, and congratulations, there’s no stopping the spread of the human plague.

Am I jaded? Of course I am. Who isn’t? Faced with the constant bombardment of images, meticulously calculated (and even not-so well thought out) placements of products and ideas, it could accurately be claimed that our perceptions of reality are so far from the truth that we set standards no one can ever meet. I want to live in a TV show. Funny, right? No, it’s not a joke; television shows are whimsical and even the dramatic stuff doesn’t last longer than an hour. Families are perfect unless they’re designed not to be, and even then they have such lovable imperfections. People are open and honest most of the time to a startling degree because that’s why we watch, and every beautiful person is fucking every other beautiful person unless they’re hindered by an age differential and even then sometimes it’s fun to just stir the pot a little bit and grandpa might get lucky.