🧠 brooding pt. 2

"Staring straight up into the sky
Oh my my a solar system that fits
In your eye
Microcosm"
- Parallel Universe, Red Hot Chili Peppers

mystery.

mystery is the theme of the year.

i'm not talking mystery like scooby-doo or (God forbid) the atrocity known as riverdale.

i'm talking about uncovering the universe. grabbing onto the fabric of reality and tearing it open. cracking open the great secret of life itself like an incomprehensibly large egg in a cosmically profound pan.

maybe i'm getting ahead of myself.

this post was inspired by a recent dc comics event. this event revolved around what were identified as the four core energies of the universe - entropy, wonder, mystery, and wisdom. very broad concepts.

i like the number four. even more so than the number three. though if you read pretty much any of my other posts, you wouldn't know it.

the eras of my life that have shaped who i am can all be neatly sliced into 4-year subdivisions. 5th grade to 8th grade. high school. and now, i'm smack dab in the middle of college.

to be completely honest, i still have no idea what the frick i'm doing. some part of me still clings to the belief that i'm just on an extended hiatus from high school or something. the hope that someday, i'll go back to feeling like everything's back in place. but by this point, i should really know better.

anyway! back to the number 4 and cosmic eggs.

my first year of college was very entropy-centric. there was a lot of change in my life. not all of it was good. a lot of it was personally challenging. dreams were crushed. new dreams rose up. then those were crushed too. it was chaotic and it kinda sucked. like entropy.

my second year started off much the same way. dark and depressing. and then some things happened that, overall, made it pretty wonderful. i got to experience some things that i could never have imagined happening. it was amazing - magical, even. everything was great! until it wasn't. i still wonder how things went so terribly wrong.

and now we slide into the year of mystery. the biggest mystery right now for me is figuring out what happens next. i've tried clinging to the paradigms of the past in hopes that they'd show me what lies ahead. but they don't work anymore. of course they don't. why did i think they would?

i've been hit by some pretty demoralizing failures already. failures in personal goals. in personal relationships. in personal growth.

it sucks. failure always sucks.

so what's the new paradigm and how does it work? that's the million-dollar question. if i can figure that out, i might be set for the rest of college. if i don't... well, i'd rather not think about it.

wisdom's pretty far down the road from here. am i gonna make it? we'll find out, i guess.

but what worries me even more is what comes after wisdom. after college. the fourth year of each era is always the most formative. 8th grade. senior year of high school. so what will senior year of college bring? and what will come after that?

then again, it's not like i can trust paradigms anymore, huh? maybe my formative year already happened. maybe my formative year is happening right now!!

...

i started this post back in october. i only got around to finishing it now. so it's kind of a weird mishmash of a rant-y introspection post and an end-of-year thoughts post.

it didn't make sense when i started it, and it sure as heck doesn't make any sense now. i assign all sorts of weird and idiosyncratic characteristics to the world just so i can make sense of it all. even though it's probably all nonsense to anyone else.

at the end of 2016, i told myself "2017 will definitely be better".

at the end of 2017, i told myself "2018 will probably be better".

tonight, i'm telling myself "2019 is gonna suck".

i'd like to believe it won't. but that's the kinda thinking that got me where i am today.

"hope for the best, expect the worst."

here's to 2019. here's to the worst. here's to stumbling through the great mystery that is life itself.