The immediacy of desire

Thursday, I was sitting in Madelaine Hron's "Human Rights in an Interdisciplinary Perspective" - one of two fourth-year seminars I'm currently taking to prove to Laurier that I am indeed fit to graduate and be a representative of their Honours English program - and it really irked me that I hadn't done any of the readings for the course, especially given how tremendously cool the discussions seemed to be. For that moment, I was thinking to myself, "Yeah, I'm going to leave here and just become an academic recluse. I'm going to really passionately throw myself into the myriad texts and expand my mind and challenge my pre-existing assumptions about the nature of things. Yeah, that'll be great."

And then I left class and went to the Cord office, checked my email and immediately wanted to help all my writers ensure they wrote their best articles this week - that Tones and I put out a damn fine News section.

And then someone makes mention of Oktoberfest and I already regret not getting a ticket to the authentic Concordia Club experience like many of my co-editors, simply because I wanted to be academically responsible, when I clearly haven't been doing readings anyway.

And then I go to work at The Record and some of the younger writers/photographers invite me out to Jane Bond and Huether and seem to forget that I'm "just a student" (a self-imposed view of my role in the Record machine), just genuinely wanting to chill with me as an equal.

And as I lie in bed in those semi-conscious moments before sleep, my mind races through all the people I wish I saw more of, the amazing friends I have that I hardly ever see and wonder if they understand why I spend so much time on classes, Cord, and The Record. If they even should understand?

The thing is - and my brother sent me a poem to this effect not long ago, so at the very worst I know this is merely an affliction that torments the Brown family - there's never enough time. The phrase "killing time" is actually a very legitimate pet peeve of mine because the notion that anyone should want to get rid of time is utterly abhorrent to me. I have a stack of books that I desperately want to throw myself into precariously balanced by my bed - and it is but a shadow of the novels I actually desire to read. Movies, music - the same. And they keep making more, the crazy punks! Besides, that doesn't even begin to open the can of worms that is travel. How I could easily spend my life travelling and not even cover one continent to my liking.

For me, it seems the immediacy of desire rules me, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. What's in front of me now is so absolutely crucial, even when I know on a conscious level that there are many other things that I care about at least equally. I mean, I like that I can be so passionately concerned about so many things, but I also wonder about my ability to discern between what truly is important to me. It can't all be, can it?

I guess the most peculiar part of this all is that I ultimately conclude not that the lack of time is a depressing thought, since I will inevitably fail to accomplish all my goals, forever outstripped by my own ambition. Rather, I look in awe at a world that is so limitless as to leave me forever with a plethora of pleasing options - perpetually spellbound by the world around me, if you will.

Oh, world. You so crazy.