the absurd!
I've been having a crazy few months, marked mostly by the heat and the work and the falling asleep at inconvenient times. I fought tooth and nail for every single one of my barely passing test scores. I tried to be the stable one while several friends fell apart in front of me. This all culminated in a sort-of breakdown at 3 a.m., in which I screamed into a pillow and deleted a bunch of hasty tweets in my locked Twitter account ranting about my workload and my pest-ridden apartment building and my smoky, smoky city.
In times like this, I go back to absurdism.
To be honest, I've only just begun reading the absurdism books. I started The Stranger on my Kindle a few days ago. But just reading about the concept itself saved me a lot when I was an unstable teenage girl in a notoriously difficult high school, desperately trying to graduate. Life is absurd, but killing yourself? Even more absurd. Not an option. Camus' refusal of suicide got me through a lot of hard days.
I don't really mind that life is absurd and meaningless. Growing up as a little Christian kid I used to be real shocked every time I read Ecclesiastes' "everything is meaningless" verses, but now it's like, Kohelet was so real for that.
We must imagine Sisyphus happy, I guess. I need to read that one next.