A few things on my mind:
1) I'm playing Humans vs Zombies, a role-play game played in campuses all over the US, for the first time in Claremont this year. Perhaps that, along with reading the Hunger Games Trilogy, has caused the themes of seiges, war, danger, competition to often prey (got it?) on my mind. I'm super aware of people around me now, constantly scanning the horizon for threats. I think games reveal so much about you, things you maybe subconsciously knew but can confirm for sure. For instance, my default strategy is to go unnoticed as long as possible, and avoid direct confrontation. Considering my less-than-stellar reflexes, this is a smart move; however it also applies to my life and how I conduct my relationships in general. I suppose I am more of a cohesive person that I sometimes think.
2) It's late here, around 1 in the morning, and I slept for 5 hours prior to this. Yesterday I got about 5-6 hours of sleep, definitely not enough for me. My point in recounting all these mundane trivialities is to notice that when your sleep schedule gets a little awry, you feel rather disconnected to the world. Right now, for instance. I feel like I could be anywhere, I don't have a sense of myself or what I need to do tomorrow or in two months and all these topics that have been occupying the DO side of my mind for weeks, months now. I am just here, now. Strangely enough I feel closely linked to the female protagonist in The Mousetrap, the play by Agatha Christie. It's a creepy, psychologically disturbing murder mystery that Agatha Christie is so good at writing (to the point of being formulaic). That feeling, of being stranded in the midst of people, of having all connection to the wider world cut off, of a pervasive sense of danger -- don't we sometimes all feel that? When your car breaks down in a lonely spot on the road?
In those cases I understand why one would feel that way, as there actually is a threat -- but I'm not sure why I do right now. It's like children being afraid of the dark. In our urbanized, technologically-advanced world we have done our best to steamroll uncertainty, to control our environment, to stem our fears with busyness. And that works most of the time. It's only in moments like these - late at night, or perhaps in a movie where one is transported into another time, another lens, or by reading a book or listening to a song (all forms of consumption, a one-way street) that we truly look into the abyss.
3) This is connected to 1 and 2 maybe...I think I am less certain of who I am than I was three years ago. I've gotten better at hiding it, justifying my choices, charting a reasonable plan and constructing a straightforward narrative that makes my current state inevitable -- but I'm less certain of who I am. Not that I knew for sure what my mission in life was three years ago, but I knew I believed in God and I wanted to do something in public-private partnerships in Malaysia. Wow, actually that doesn't sound very different from now. That's somewhat reassuring. Even in the chaos I have now about the small things, the short-term decisions (ok, perhaps some pretty long-term ones in terms of where I want to be for the next few years), some fundamental things haven't changed.
It's getting late, I'm going to stop being weird and get some rest.
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