Opposition to Opposites.

Opposites attract. I know this. Everyone knows this. The problem with this mantra is that it is all too often employed as an excuse for two people of the opposite sex who probably can’t stand each other to pointlessly pursue meaning. Think of if you took two people you know who share very few interests with each other and you introduced them. According to this grand theory, they would instantly be attracted to each other (does this make any sense at all?). Let’s humor ourselves and say they are legitimately attracted to each other and begin to spend time together. How long does this attraction last until one has had enough of the other’s seemingly appalling interests and can bear no more?

Some people think that people act like magnets. You place opposing magnets together and they stick together. Forever. What most people are not aware of, however, is Newton’s Law of Reverse Magnetic Repulsion. You see, though opposites initially attract each other, the energy needed to perpetually bind these two opposites eventually exhausts and results in the opposites repelling each other. So the saying really should be “opposites attract, then repel.” This makes much more sense to me, especially in terms of people.

…….Ok, so maybe that last paragraph was complete bullshit and there’s no such thing as reverse magnetic repulsion. But there should be a principle like this, right? After the initial attraction, the differences between the two sides become increasingly apparent until this collection of oppositions proves intolerable. Upon this realization, I decided to disregard any of my urges to pursue someone who I had a 95% chance of eventually loathing.

Sadly, with most people, the idea of opposites repelling after an initial spark means the more you know about a person the less you are going to like them. Is it perhaps better to preserve this preliminary attraction to someone by taking pains to avoid knowing them? You probably thought he/she was great until you realized you fundamentally disagree on what to do with your lives or that you discovered what was to you their fatal flaw. Life is all a series of disappointments and one day, you pick a life that has disappointed you the least and resign yourself to that.

The trick is to realize how mediocre this world truly is. Living behind the distortions of optimism will only lead to more innocence shattering moments that should have all occurred as a child. Once one truly believes that they possess the divinity to change someone they wholly solidify their inevitable failure. You will never be able to change someone, so what is the point in starting with someone you know you would want to change things about?

Opposites don’t attract. They hate each other.

Making Life Cliche.

We’re all running around trying to project images of intellectualism and worldliness when half the time we’re just being self-righteous and pretending to transcend the status quo and being someone worth something. We try to exude our self-perceived intellectual prowess, thinking we have some grasp of the metaphysical that those lesser couldn’t possibly understand, but half the time it’s the lucky idiots that turn this entire goal of being respected on its head. We put these words together, forcing them to at least appear aesthetically pleasing to our eye and perhaps no one else’s. The biggest fraud is no one has words that can really express what they mean and rely on the permutations of word combinations to try to make it look good if they can’t find the winning combination. We’re driven completely by what others will think, but our most emotionally invested attempts to expose our souls are found in these very pages, safely kept from judgmental eyes. What is it to know someone? Do you look towards a collection of trivial knowledge, a standard of time spent with another person, a person you can safely confide in? I’m not really sure if anyone completely knows me, but oftentimes there are people I understand better just by seeing a look in their eyes than people I have known for years. Is this a failure of the lack of adequate words, or simply our fear of becoming vulnerable?

A Boethian Apocalypse.

I have always wanted to live the perfect day. Every night when I go to bed, I think about all the decisions I made and how a different permutation of decisions may have made my day much better (or worse). To put it in painfully simplified terms, I wish my life played out like a fucking Choose Your Own Adventure book. As belittling as that sounds, it’s mostly true.

Take just the last 24 hours of your life, for instance. You could have started looking for a new job to quit the one you hate, confessed your undying love to the object of your affection, or started to break a bad habit. Every second of the day is really just another iteration in the chaos theory of life and in the last 3 seconds I probably just sent everything in the wrong direction and fucked up by day. We’ll never know. What I do know, however; is that I have never and probably will never win a Choose Your Own Adventure book on the first reading. There’s always the notion of the winning combination, but never the belief that you’re going to guess it out of thin air.

I’ve heard the phrase “I live my life without regrets” from far too many oblivious and naïve people. I would love to meet a person who wholeheartedly embodies this mantra just so I could relentlessly pester them into admitting that they regretted doing something. Does anyone really live for a few hours without thinking of something they should or shouldn’t have done? If I failed to help them find something they regretted, they would sure as hell regret meeting me at least. By the end of my lifetime, I hope to have done 27 things that I didn’t regret, but I fear this goal is far too ambitious.

My inability to fathom living a regret-less life probably stems from my pseudo-destructive over-analysis of every aspect of my life. (As I write this, irrational fears about the previous sentence being too wordy materialize). This is why I will never gather the conviction to get a tattoo. I can almost guarantee you I would find a reason to hate it within a year and would spend quadruple the amount I got it for to get it removed (The removal process, of course, wouldn’t fully erase and I would be condemned to a life as an indecisive Hester Prynne). Being the fatal person I am, I am almost certain that my mind is programmed to search for flaws. This proves to be supremely disastrous when you are also a perfectionist. How can one live this mythical perfect day when one also spends half their day trying to figure out what has already gone wrong? I am now beginning to regret expressing my desires to even conceive the idea of a perfect day.

I really do think Groundhog Day is one of the most depressing movies ever. Great, Bill Murray figured out the way to live that day just the right way so that everything worked out. This took him 4372 tries (an approximate figure). Now, imagine if tomorrow you woke up and had to the chance to live a day over again. I’ve let so many people slip through my life and permitted so many indecisions to stagnate my boring existence to count, and if given the chance, would should sure as hell attempt to combat the passivity and pursue something other than just getting to the next day. Of course, this couldn’t all be fixed in one day—I know I would probably overzealously screw up my day right from the get-go in an act of overcompensation and want to try again but probably wouldn’t get the chance.

Lou Reed thinks the perfect day involves drinking Sangria in a park and going home or going to the zoo and then the movies. While Lou Reed is an extremely talented artist and this song helped establish his solo career post Velvet Underground, it also makes him sort of an idealistic idiot. I do not care how much you love spending the day with the person you love, but days as simplistic as the ones you describe staunchly contrast with the definition of ‘perfect.” If a day at the zoo is the best you can do Lou Reed, I fear you may have spent your faux-perfect day with the wrong person.

Traditional rhetoric suggests “every day is a new day.” This is true (in its most basic form), but the fact that said day is “new” also suggests that it is no more familiar to you than the previous day when you woke up. Tomorrow, I will wake up knowing I am going to work from eight to five. This is not new at all. I know what I will do tomorrow, save for a few details. I suppose tomorrow will be technically ‘new,’ but it won’t feel like it.

It appears the only way to be completely satisfied with life is to pretend. You can either:
a) obliviously declare that you would change nothing about your life
b) self-servingly cower behind empty mantras
c) somehow live every day 4372 times (again, an approximate figure) or until you get it right, which ever comes first.

Unfortunately for me, I am none of the above. The perfect day I have mythologized so ardently in the last paragraphs will never show itself. Perhaps I will go to bed believing I played everything just right, but I will wake up the next day only to find the proverbial fly in the ambrosial ointment. Philosophy offers no consolation.