I do not intend to sound the least bit racist, but I'm going to state a fact that has been concerning me. There are two girls who attend classes with me who wear the niqab (or burqa), but that's not my problem, I'm pro-choice. I'm just a bit confused when one of them comes up to me and says hello. Because I only came to know their names this week, and it takes a great deal of effort for me not confuse their names so I won't offend them by implying that all women who wear the niqab are the same to me. I really do not intend to make fun of those ladies, or the way they practice religion, I'm just saying I'm confused. Another thing that bugs me is writing identical P's; I never get this right. If I want to write any word that has two P's, like apply, there's no way they're going to be identical! I want to know what an expert would say about that. But enough about school. Today I won't be talking about school, or complaining about school, or all the things I dislike. Today, I reflect.
It's one thing to vent, regardless of the manner with which you vent (whether it sounds too dark, or disappointed because eventually, you know exactly how it's going to end, but you vent any way)and another thing to be dissatisfied. One of the things that perhaps really get to me is how some people suffer from chronic dissatisfaction. I admit, I personally suffered from "understandable" dissatisfaction, simply because 4 years in college have never been a challenge in my life, except for my very last semester, and I had too much to offer to a place that didn't need me to do anything. This is understandable dissatisfaction. The dissatisfaction I cannot understand, not even remotely, is how people who have certain things that they know are good, and perhaps cannot get any better, are always looking for something else. People who sit with you in a restaurant thinking of other places they could be right then, married people who have a good thing going (I'm aware that some married couples made colossal mistakes choosing their spouses, obviously I'm not talking about them), I'm talking about the type of relationships our grandparents and some of our parents have/had, 40-year anniversaries and such, people who, whatever they have going for them at the moment, are always looking, tirelessly, for other things to do. This hollowness I do not understand. Nothing seems to fill them up, so they always look for what they don't have, thinking their happiness, or satisfaction lays there. It's like someone who found water in a desert, not an oasis, just water, and sees mirages, and follows those mirages, only to find that they were nothing but mirages, moving on to other mirages, and so on. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not for sitting on our asses doing nothing to achieve successes, or strive for a happy life, this stuff doesn't come easily, I am aware that they are causes worth living for, and causes worth dying for. I'm with wasting our lives on worthy causes, be them individual, collective, or universal causes. Hint: mirages are not causes.
Money and happiness, and the way they are associated or dissociated; I think our lives would've been different if money was measured by how much it weighs. That way, you can get more for less. I am not, by any means, a materialistic person, and the things I buy are sold by people who want to make profit, so sometimes conformity with the system is the only way to go. But sometimes I wish we still lived in a time where countries or individuals exchanged things. If I had a farm and had lots of chicken that produce lots of eggs, what's the harm of my going up to a cow farm and exchange those eggs for some dairy? Of course, the things that I need are neither dairy nor egg. They're mostly pieces I like to keep for the rest of my life, and as a legacy for my offspring, if I ever procreate. And from this, stems my need to buy certain things, things that I think will somehow enrich my life, or perhaps give me emotional reassurance. Suddenly, the act of buying things has a more profound meaning, because now it's not the urge you get to buy things all the time, it's what you want to buy and what value it adds to your life.
On a lighter note, I think cab drivers who complain about how traffic-jammed the way to your destination is are flat out assholes. If you're going to your job or class, you're also stuck in traffic, and there's a good chance you're going to be late, I wonder how it would make the cab driver feel if you start complaining about how late you are going to be, or how ugly your job or major is. People do not seem to grasp the mechanism of how things work. You do your job, I do mine, and everything falls into place. Fail to do so, and things are not only going to be out of place, but all over the place.
And for those Milan Kundera fans out there, yes, the title is a tribute to his book.
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