What if what-ifs get too overwhelming, too early?
24 August 2009, 8:45 am
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woke upI woke up this morning wanting to make lists, wanting to start school, and wanting to get things done. It then occurred to me that I will be completely counterproductive if I have all these grand plans to make things happen but no notion or direction toward how to actually accomplish them.
So today I guess I’ll be sifting through the papers downstairs. I am going to try and finish my reading cards– although I’m not sure how happy I’ll be re-submerging myself in the hazy medical green fog of lobotomies and Big-boobed Nurse. I might try making lists: what I need for school, what I have for school, what I need to do in order to be ready for school, what I should be doing so I don’t suck when I go back to school.
I’m a smidgeon excited.
Here’s the downside, the only one that I can see.
I had a dream last night that life flew by.
I woke up and discovered what the hell, that’s not a dream, really.
In my dream, I texted Caitlin in September, and the next thing I knew, it was her birthday in November. And I hadn’t talked to her in all the time in between. Dumb.
Not going to happen, either.
It reminded me of “Marley & Me.” The dream did: where at the beginning John and Jenny are twenty-ish and by the end they’re in their forties. All that time vanished in the span of two hours. Not even.
What if that happens to me? Life rocketing by so fast that all I catch of it is a blur? What if I waste it? What if I mess it up? What if I can’t fix my mistakes, or leave a friend when they need me, or end up giving up something I love without knowing it?
What if I don’t live life, and never even know the difference?
One flew east
27 July 2009, 10:47 am
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west“…one flew west. One flew over the cuckoo’s nest” (Kesey 239).
Ken Kesey’s riveting novel definitely opens one’s eyes to a time and place that normal society almost never thinks back to. The sixties, a sanitarium, and men fighting– to the death, sometimes– in a battle for their own dignity.
I recently finished writing and revising my essay for JCC English, and in doing that and from reading the book I have opened my mind to so many strange facets of society that I hadn’t before. Lobotomy– permanently damaging (NOT helping) someone’s brain– was popular then. So was electro-shock therapy, which is essentially electrocution for the “insane.”
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the ward nurse Miss Ratched runs the place with a brutal, iron, ice-cold fist. “…I see her sit in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, tend her network with mechanical insect skill, know every second which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the results she wants” (Kesey 30). Then in comes the indomitable Randle Patrick McMurphy, a sane man who thought the ward was safer and less rigorous than the work farm he’d previously been on. The epic (at least to my mind) struggle of a man fighting for his fellow man against the cruel power of the institution makes for not only good reading, but a stimulation of the mind… a kind of minor electro-shock that sets off other little-shock-thought-processes.
What was McMurphy fighting for? What was he fighting against, really? A bitch with huge boobs and strange orange lipstick? Or a gargantuan power determined to kick the defenseless?
Although the result of McMurphy’s battle for change is unexpected and alarming, and certainly disheartening, I found myself bizarrely reassured by the end. The casualties encountered on the way to the final product that was the ward had not really been in vain, after all. One flew east, one flew west… Madness overtook the patients and they could fight it or give up. They either committed suicide, or were killed, or were discharged or left. But in the end, the point was, they all flew.
Kick Drum Heart 