Things to extract from the grind:
- Interactions can be difficult.
...the bewitching persistence of emotional subterfuge...
So I start school again, and I've miraculously been handed a job again, through no real effort of my own. It's both fortunate and unfortunate for me that fortune smiles on me occupationally... I don't deserve the easy lifestyle I live, and I really would benefit from working a little harder for things. I won't disagree to that, not at all. But should I really fight it? I mean, I shouldn't over exert myself if my requirements are fulfilled by some invisible hand...
Maybe I'm just over-thinking things again.
That would be my estimation of the situation
Reading
I'm reading The Gulag Archipelago and I can honestly say it's like nothing else I've ever read. Stylistically, in scale, in tone... really it's a hard book to take but fascinating. I really do have a hard time dissuading myself that prison isn't the worst thing we've ever devised. (Prison and all its various dehumanizing accoutrements, of course).
Beaten for 21 days in a row...
A dry hunger strike for 11 days and no one notices...
25 years for stealing an ear of corn from the land you've lived on your whole life...
The scale of it is mind-boggling.
Things in my life
Despite the material ease of my life in the near future, the human side has been somewhat deteriorating. A long-distance relationship that seems to be petering out combined with distant and vacation-bound friends equates loneliness for me. Not that I'm a terribly social person, but the silence gets to you after a while, and Solzhenitsyn isn't helping.
Complain Complain Complain.
I'll end with a prayer: