Twenty Five

You know those questions people ask to get a quick glance at your overall character? For the record I hate them. I think they are quite asinine. For example, the half glass question. You know, the one asking if you see it as half empty or half full. The former brands you as a pessimist while the latter an optimist. I always felt contempt to this question because I could never answer it truthfully given only those two options. If I saw a glass with only half the amount of water inside of it I would call it neither half empty nor half full. I would say it simply does not matter. If you stop to think about it, the fact of it being empty or full really has no real bearing on anything useful.

If there is a glass with only half the amount of water, what will happen? Someone will come and drink it, or it will get poured down the drain, or it will just sit there on the table. If it were to just sit on the table it cannot last forever. Nature will run its course and it will eventually evaporate into the sky and one day change form into rain. That rain will end up in some body of water or within the soil or the street or the sewer. So then, why then all this attention to some insignificant detail that has nothing to do with anything? From this response many deemed me apathetic, but I think it would be more accurate to name me a realist. In reality nothing really matters. It was hard for me to place real importance on anything since the age of seven. I would often question the use of simple tasks, like bed making. Why make your bed every single morning if only to undo it in the evening to sleep? What’s the point? I do not know if this way of thinking is healthy but it made me not put too much thought into my decisions. I just make then rather nonchalantly with the thought in the background that one day I will be gone and no one will no so what’s the point?

This effortless way of existence began to be threatened in March 2009, two months before I turned twenty-five. It was then it somehow clicked and I registered that I would be in this world for a quarter century. For some irrational reason this thought grew into a form of acute anxiety. It was not as though I felt old per say. It was a more I was becoming overwhelmed by the pressure to plan- to sit down and think of what direction my life should take and make steps to make it possible, instead of just floating through life leaving everything up to fate.

Redemption came in unexpected form: The Colbert Report, an American news show which satirizes conservative news pundits in which Colbert plays, in his own words, a “well-intentioned, poorly informed high status idiot.” In one episode he was interviewing Ron Howard director of “Angels and Demons.” Colbert asked him how he felt about the Vatican’s proposed boycott of the film, much like their boycott of “The Da Vinci Code” (which made an $540M international box office, mind you). Howard responded that in Chinese crisis means opportunity. While that is not entirely true, it turned a left on my current situation. So I thought:

What essentially does crisis mean? a chance to make an improvement, a favorable one. And crisis? a critical moment perceived as a problem because it seems dangerous because it will change the normal routine of your daily life.

It is here it dawned on me that my whole turning twenty five dilemma was really just pressure to settle down into a more definite path. But if nothing really matters why all the needless stress? I could not come up with a reasonable answer thus curing my crisis.