Current mood:

confused

people take existence so seriously in berkeley. that isn't to say that it's a bad thing, because they tend to get a lot of shit done. but why is santa cruz so much nicer? it's because they in santa cruz live life day to day not searching for happiness for themselves, but reveling in the certainty that happiness is always with them. they do not put off happiness until later, until after college when they have gotten their As and start trying to live in the real cold world. what if everyone lived like i have the past two and a half years? the western world would move slower. and what's so wrong with that? we move too quickly anyway. westerners have trouble releasing themselves, connecting with others in the world, connecting with the world itself, and it's because we are caught up in our own seriousness, working to feed future families, overachieving to please our perhaps-dead parents, rushing to bed after drowning in long oceans of days; it leaves us so blind. any of you that have meditated know that we do not need to be entertained. multitasking makes it harder to slow ourselves down when we need to, to notice the beauty in each cell and speck of the vast world we live in. why didn't they tell us as kids that everything we were being told was probably bullshit?

i wonder what the future will be like. i want to be cryogenically frozen and thawed in three hundred years. what will our patterns of culture be like then? how will our economy work? what will we know then to be true that we are skeptical of now? what will we know then that we could never imagine now? i wonder the same thing about the ancient past, when the population of the world was a size such that we did not sell our days into oblivion. imagine a world that releases its pressure on you to buy, admire, think, do, where we all find our passions and harmonize. will the future ever be like this, or will the fears of the world win out before we can get there? i want to be optimistic. take me away from the city where i can yell and spasm and love and not think about all the other times others have loved or said they have loved. i don't care!!! santa cruz has birthed me but this semester berkeley is smothering me in doubt. i have lost my way back to the smooth land, where i can roll along and know my position and throw away all cares of my momentum. how can i feel that the way the world turns is so unrealistic? what has conditioned me so?

i don't understand happiness right now, man. i have just lost my way. i have had anxiety problems my whole life. after high school i just forgot i had them. i suppose i found them again this semester, which of course doesn't make any sense. so much is different that i can't point to one thing to say that it caused the change. it wasn't berkeley itself. there were a few weeks in october last semester where each day was one of the best days i have lived. i live somewhere else physically. and miguel and joey and alan and chris are gone. i do not engage in social activity outside my own house except shows. i play more music myself. i don't really smoke weed. i spend most of my social time with one close friend. i have lots more schoolwork and obligation this semester than i have had since high school. i feel single and i think single, and i think about thinking single, and how much i hate it. i hate having crushes on girls. i have spent so much time dealing with the world that i have forgotten how best to deal with myself. this is a problem. i want summertime and i want to be far away from everything i know.