America: From the Passenger Seat of a Car

I made it.

Across the country in 11 days from Boston to Los Angeles. Red eye back to Boston through Charlotte to just barely make my first class of the semester. Not a bad way to spend the last few weeks of what is mostly likely my last innocent summer. From now on I am in the world of making a living and figuring out what the hell I am supposed to do for the next 40-50 years of my life. Honestly roadtrips seem much more fun.

I wish I could put down in this blog what this roadtrip was like. Not only was it one of the most freeing experiences in my life but it changed the way I see the world. Life is simple when you live out of a car and wake up in a different city every morning. In one day I stood at the Grand Canyon and walked the strip of Las Vegas. Woke up in a Howard Johnson and fell asleep in the Trump Towers. And at some point, I believe between getting separated, navigating through West Texas using only a map and encountering an enormous thunderstorm with Michael I realized that this was special. I never thought of America as a beautiful place from coast to coast but I was dead wrong. While standing on the side of the highway in the dark of Texas with my back against the car, eyes up looking at the stars I decided that we have to enjoy this. By that I mean we have to enjoy whatever our life is, great or shitty. The one thing I learned is that there are a lot of beautiful things we miss in our lives till we are forced to sit and look at them. For 11 days I learned a lot about those parts of my life. So if you are thinking about going cross country...get some friends..pack your car and do it..no matter what it takes.

The end of this roadtrip however marked the beginning of my Senior year of College. College in itself has been interesting. Emerson, though being an extremely interesting school and having a number of great professors, lacks a lot of what i wanted from college. However I would never change going to school here for the few people who without this school I would not have met. They are worth the millions dollars in loans. I am not afraid to admit that I cannot wait to leave the city. I am now 100% sure that I do not fit here at all and probably never will.

The one thing I do enjoy about the city though is the number of great concerts. In the next few months I will get to see Mumford and Sons and Johnny Flynn in Boston. They give me faith that mainstream music may become great again.

Life is a series of impressions

David Hume examined perception in the human mind and came to the assumption that our lives are made up of perceptions and not actual facts. What we remember about our lives are just ideas or perceptions we made about people, places, or things. Ever remember something happing one way while your friend remembering it a different way, that is Hume's theory at work. Not many philosophers to this day have chose to argue his points of the human mind and for good reason, he was right. Now I am sure that I am not alone in thinking how scary it is that we cannot even remember our lives without bias. In the same vain though it makes each and every one of us unique with intrinsic oneness. We remember our lives based on the way we felt and images we stored away. For many of us that means that our lives in the long run will be remembered as a series of great and not so great events, with the mediocre day to day stuff lost to the world.

However, everyone will be viewed by the rest of the world as well and those people will take their own unique perceptions and ideas away about you. That is why perfection would ruin the human race. We are made to all have faults because without them we would never have nothing worth remembering. Our lives would just be facts, one on top of another. I used to put a lot of thought into this blog for this exact reason, I wanted to remember how great and how flawed I am. Perceptions are all we have and maybe I can capture something here that otherwise would of been lost. What Hume was trying to get at in a not so flowery and philosophical way is that what makes us human are our faults, our emotions, and our view of the world. He was trying to acknowledge how beautiful our faults can be and will be, and for just a second remember that our lives are completely our own, for good or bad.

It Goes On

I am back, very unceremoniously but back none the less. I honestly do not have much to say right now. In the past I was cocky enough to think that my writing was witty or interesting. Even as I write this I realize it seems a bit cocky to think anyone would like reading this entry but fuck it. In the last year I have had my ass handed to me by life. No direction and a severe feeling of emptiness and being stuck. I live constantly on the brink of breaking down and giving up, barely enough energy to get dressed in the morning. Through this all though I keep the hope that something good will happen. As Robert Frost once said "In three words I can sum up everything I have ever learned about life...It Goes On"

Sometimes whether we want it to or not..life goes on and it can only get better....I think.