What a wonderful world

As of yet I don’t believe I’ve really mentioned the world outside of my roaming thoughts and tentative plans for the ill-conceived future. One of the reasons for this is that I live on a small campus with one access point to the outside physical world. That access point is currently buried in carefully layered snow and ice that looks like a god-sized Mick Jagger sneezed all the coke and phlegm in the world onto southern Vermont. We have two televisions with cable on campus.

Therefore my primary contact with the outside world, beyond the occasional text message from my mom, is virtual. I get the New York Times via email every morning and I usually just scan the headlines before sending it to my trash folder. The occasional story will catch my eye, and I was a relatively avid reader during the campaign. Beyond that, I tend to approach the outside world in much the same way that a young child walking in on his parents having sex for the first time does. First you think, “Are they fighting?” Then you try your best to forget that it ever happened.

Fuck off, real world. I’m happy here in my beautiful bubble.

I used to love this song by Incubus off the album A Crow Left of the Murder called Sick Sad Little World. The chorus, as one may imagine, went something like; “leave me here in my stark raving sick sad little world.” Though, as I recall, it sounded more like; “Leave me here in my(etc…) starkravingsicksad little worrrrld….” It fucking rocked. Whenever the folks were out I would turn it up really loud and sing along at the top of my lungs. I loved that feeling of exhilaration I got from the guitar solo. To be perfectly honest though, at a live show it’s the drums that make me swoon.

There was this one time, at my dad’s house, when I had the music cranked up to eleven and was belting out some emo rock constructed primarily of teenaged heartbreak and sappy power chords that my father and my brother came home. I stopped mid-line and hurried to turn down the music and casually ask how their bowling (or whatever the hell it was) went. They never mentioned my shameless (until they had arrived at least) warbling.

What I’m getting at with all of this is that I want to someday be someone who not only is well aware of current events, but who helps shape them. In a way that helps as many people as possible. Which is what all of this talk about art and study and Orson Wells really means. I want to be an intellectual. I want to be recognized as such and, based on my merits in a certain area (education or international relations), integral to the shaping of policy in that or those area/s.

Ego trip? Maybe. I knew a girl once who wanted to be the president. It was part of the reason that I loved her. She was unambiguous about that desire and why she wanted it. She felt she could do a good job, or at least a much better job than then-president Bush was doing. I don’t know what she did with that dream – I don’t know her in the least anymore – but it inspired me to really think hard about what I wanted out of this life.

The bottom line ended up being that I wanted to help people. And that I was sick of how things seemed to be run. I no longer want to help people. Is that cold? I read a really good article on it by Ivan Illich called “To Hell with Good Intentions” (http://www.altruists.org/static/files/To%20Hell%20with%20Good%20Intentions%20(Ivan%20Illich).pdf). His argument is much more complicated than many that I’ve offered, but mine come from experience on both sides of charity. To boil it down to its bare bones, charity begets charity. Sure it is necessary as a stop gap, but honestly it tends to hurt more than it helps, feeding a culture of poverty that insists on having ‘needy’ (objects) and ‘generous’ (subjects). Instead of helping people – which seems to me to be a very patronizing (I know best and have the resources you don’t) and colonial (let me teach you what it means to be civilized) act – I’d like to improve society so that more people have every opportunity to live their lives as they’d like to live them.

These are the things I think about at 1:30am when I have class at 8 in the morning.