Low

It might be having to study for exams, or it might be hormonal, or it might be the changing of the seasons, but whatever it is, I feel incredibly low today, and not in a cool indie-rock Mormon couple way.

(Note to self: Evaluate at some point whether references like the one I made above are attempts at over-cleverness which reflect some deep subconscious pop-psychology-stoked insecurity of mine, or whether they’re perfectly acceptable expressions of the connections my mind makes, and this is the one place I can express them given that if I said things like that in normal life, people would look at me with polite incomprehension. As I said, note to self.)

Reading the news with any sort of emotional involvement at all is a recipe for depression. Bush says fuck you to Kyoto. Anti-abortionists just keep on killing abortionists. Timothy McVeigh calls the children who died in Oklahoma “collateral damage”. Trouble goes on in the usual trouble spots, and then some. I feel a sort of impotent fury at the world, and the conglomeration of human (un)reason that goes into making these things happen.

You know what else terrifies me? The fact that all this is going on, and chances are that I can keep on living my charmed easy life, flying between comfort zones London and Singapore, and none of it is likely to really affect me that much in my lifetime, unless weapons of mass destruction get involved.

It disturbs me how easy it would be to stop caring. To shut myself in with my books and my music (geez, this all sounds very I Am A Rock) and shake my head in resignation when I read about 10 month old babies killed by snipers, and then go play Dope Wars the next minute.

And then the other question is: what the hell is your caring worth, Michelle, if you don’t do anything about anything except sit around all day reading the news? I’m sure suffering people are grateful that you care even though you spend far more money on buying CDs than in donations to charities that might help them. I’m sure they speak fondly of you to aid workers, because you spent five seconds thinking “poor, poor suffering people” before you turned the page and read about the Oscars.

It’s a Moebius strip of frustration and malaise and “Michelle, everything may be crap but so are you” and I really just wish we were all better people, and I also wish that didn’t sound as stupid and trite as it did, but I did mean it.

(Note: Dope Wars deliberately not linked to. May you all be spared from its enslavement.)