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five months pass...
one year passes...
one year passes...
Rant/Using ILX as a blog/soapbox follows (just a heads up).
Today would've been Kafka's 130th birthday. Google Doodle is paying homage to him.
And I think back at what a bizarre last year and a half it has been: from moving to a different country, to aging parents on constant verge of death, to failed or unstable career moves.
Today was the due date to pay my IRS tax return, as well. As a Canadian living in the US, it bothers me that I had to move here. But I guess things never go as planned. And now I, too, feel like a monstrous vermin, crawling around the sewers of Los Angeles. When once health and exercise were an important part of my routine, now I struggle to have a decent quality of life and avoid breathing in crazy particulates when running on a hot, empty suburban street, where people initially looked at me strangely and locked their doors as I approached them. I guess they weren't used to having someone run around their safe and pretty neighbourhood. Ghost town.
All of it puts into question your self-worth, I suppose. And to add insult to injury, the American government is prepping for a cute role as police state. Canada, as spineless as their government officials are, follow along, and will now share all data with them. I wonder how long it'll take Canada Student Loan to figure out I'm not really in the country and force me to pay an exorbitant amount of money each month. I guess renewing my passport might tip them off.
It's a good thing I don't do drugs, because all this has upped my paranoia. I hardly use my fancy iPhone and don't post or talk about personal things on Facebook, Instagram, Skype and other suspicious software. I guess you can say posting this rant on ILX is my breaking point. I don't know. I might want to become a US citizen one day and from mine and others' experience when crossing the border, it seems like they'll point to anything that can make you a criminal or unwanted in the Land of the Free™. I guess their making a big deal of the smallest things is their defence mechanism. Meanwhile, the Harper Government has a plan of its own to destroy our country. I guess I should start defriending my anarchist and socialist friends. Or I don't betray who I really am and get on that RetroShare app. But encryption adds another level of suspicious activity, as one headline reads, "NSA: If Your Data Is Encrypted, You Might Be Evil, So We'll Keep It Until We're Sure". Then there's "US Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement", "Never Trust Facebook", "The Criminal NSA", "The Fallacy of Human Freedom", "DHS Watchdog: 'Intuition and Hunch' Are Enough to Search Your Gadgets at Border", the Utah Data Center. Maybe I should cancel my Verizon service as soon as my contract is up. Maybe surrounding myself with good people will help me deal with all this.
I'm sure LA has wonderful people, but I sure wish I would stop meeting crazy artists, charlatans, opportunists, money-hungry businessmen, and start meeting, you know, normal people. Not that Vancouver doesn't have their share of crazies, but the ratio for crazy-to-normal seems higher here. Concrete jungle, for sure. But so many people want to move down here. Colour me confused, I guess.
I guess in the end I should stick to using the few good opportunities I've been given to my advantage and plan my Great Exodus as soon as possible. That's possibly the silver lining in all of this -- barely.
I always replay an incident from university in my head. It was my last final before graduating -- my Eastern European literature class. I lived just a few blocks from campus, in a 2-bedroom basement suite. I woke up an hour early because I tend to stress out easily and get paranoid about the smallest things, as you can tell from this rambling. My exam is at 8:30 and I am ready to leave by 8:00. As I go to open the door, I notice the door is locked. I unlock the knob but realise the top lock can only be opened with a key. The key had always remained in the keyhole for this very reason, I realised. But there was no key. In other words, the lock from the inside required a key to unlock the door. With no key, there was no way to open the door. I look to the only window large enough for me to exit, but there were bars protecting it. I remember thinking I wished I had some handyman tools at that point, but luckily I had my trusty mobile phone. Except no one picked up. I sat there for 45 minutes and someone finally came. I was late to my exam but while I waited I wrote a note to my prof explaining exactly what surreal conditions prevented me from being on time. When I got to class, I handed him the note and he handed me my exam questions. I had to choose one. I wrote an explanation of the term Kafkaesque.
And it seems like it's always like this. One is always waiting for another to open that locked door to let her in. As much as one is ready to go, it is very much a prisoner in a cell situation. It is not you who decides when to take the next step, it is the step, the external factors, the situation out of your grasp that comes looking for you.
I know I'm not the only one in this situation or with these feelings and that many others understand from experience. And many others are in far worse situations. But if the beginning of understanding is the wish to die, I don't know if I want to understand.
I apologise for the above. You can go back to your regularly scheduled programme.
― c21m50nh3x460n, Wednesday, 3 July 2013 19:14 (ten years ago) link
two weeks pass...
nine years pass...