45 Minutes Left in Existentialism

Typing quietly so as not to attract attttteennnnntttttioooonnnn
Sometimes I am distraught by how useless this whole subject is. In one way (excuse me while I kiss the sky), this is religion: elevating opinions to fact, and revering fiction with the austere severity called to mind by men in tassel-toed shoes. Curious that Sartre and De Beauvoir could discuss for hundreds of pages man's universal blight, curious that it should be studied in lecture halls, curious it could me a "major" a "discipline" a "subject" to be considered expert in. Philosophy is more conjecture than even the most theoretical science: there is no proof, and no potential for proof, anywhere. That shouldn't really mean the whole subject is useless (obviously Heidegger was smarter than me, so I should respect him, right?) but when discussions are conducted not as forums for volleying questions around but rather lectures devoted to committing vocab to memory, I step outside myself and let the thought fly by that we are all silly to be studying this inside. A real application of these theories (THEORIES THEORIES THEORIES) would better be served eating ice cream, while we talk. In the park. Living.

Loads of excuses this week for why I refuse to plunge unquestioningly into fields. I like to ask questions. Am I becoming sassy, am I cutting myself slack, or is my personal bullshit barometer gaining street cred?

Kid-I-once-thought-was-foreign who frequently sits cuddled over a laptop is dominating today's discussion (inane. About the value of explaining heady philosophy in layman's terms). That's kinda funny. I like him. He just pulled off the word 'presuppose' very elegantly.

As the future approaches, as I seem to become more hostile and defensive regarding life choices,I keep thinking about irreversible mistakes. Wrote this for spectrum:

Brittany Allen
Scene II: A Spectrum of Essays

I try to keep track of the things that make me cry these days. The actor in me wants to distill little tragedies, dissect them chemically and perfunctorily, follow droplets of moisture from where they sometimes well in the corner of my eyes up through their emotional nougat center and back through their microscopic physical properties with the unsentimental scrutiny of a scientist separated as much as BI-focally from a distant subject. On stage, it is to be seen as a skill, crying. It is a thing to strive towards being able to replicate on command, and with convincing, authentic ease.
Things that make me cry: Lost Pet signs, especially those with desperate monetary rewards promised in runny felt marker. A cold smattering of 70s power ballads. An embarrassing smattering of large-scale show-biz 90s musicals. These two documentaries: Imagine: The John Lennon Story and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. My best friends being sad. Lonely nights. Wakes. One particular 70s power ballad is Elvis Costello’s “Brilliant Mistake”. Often, Lonely nights involve a certain rotation of predictable laments, some coulda-woulda-shoulda’s, some whiny wishing that either myself or the recent past had somehow unfolded dramatically differently. Both gestures are impotent, evaluative stabs at making rhyme or reason out of patently unreasonable things. Come to think of it, “impotent, evaluative stabs at making rhyme or reason out of patently unreasonable things” are tears. Themselves.
Gene Weingarten is typically a humor writer for The Washington Post. He also wrote an article that won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing I think this morning: “Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car is a Horrifying Mistake. Is it a crime?”. How could I call it ‘HORROR’ and not somehow be cheapening the adjectives, the verbs…Big men shaking. Sad-faced women, who will never be able to procreate or clear adoption records again, testifying that the day they left a baby in a sweltering car seat for hours (by MISTAKE) was really the most mundane, the most innocent of days. People who loved being parents, were good at being parents, but forgot one task one day. In the scheme of a life, the singular-ness, the mere seconds of omission involved in a massive error are so…dissolvable. Unsolvable. Mystic and terrible, not unlike a first tear, really, poetically-speaking.
Crying, read the article: Gene Weingarten will argue that a fatal distraction is not a crime at all. It is rather that which few among us would ever willingly concede to: it’s defeat, failure, unabashed human error of the worst kind. “Humans,” a source of his notes in the article, “have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible”. Not so, if these case studies (HORROR) of devastated parents can be considered. Despite any potential higher power. Despite the best efforts by the best people. There is such a thing as Luck, and it would seem that it lives across the street from Blunder but appears manically and intermittently and inconveniently as a neighbor, like an oft-away businessman or a wealthy family with other properties in other states. In this way, there is no justice with a ‘mistake’, just a lack of blessing. I listen to my music, I try to remember what in specific first made me cry.
Some of the parents have been judged before juries and judges, but most just by the heaviness of existing legally “innocent” of the kind of implacable crime that can only be paid for in debts of unfathomable, unending, unimaginable guilt. How do you move on from there, I wonder? What does the world become when ‘mistake’ is HORROR is unfair is forever unresolved? These terrible things that happen to nice people at random, the blinking time it takes for these events to be put in motion. I put them next to Lonely nights and Elvis Costello. I read. I leak a little and try to forget to study the chemical composition of my oozing tears. I want to believe that the next time I cry on stage it will be a conducted kind-of accident. A surprise. Unpredicted.
Petty. Pittances, in comparison, all the mistakes I have ever made. Will ever make? On a Lonely night, I make flow charts. On a Lonely night (reading a humor writer’s tragedy, lamenting the recent past, a Lost Dog sign, a day in class worrying that I am wasting my life) I knock on wood for Luck. For more Luck.
I listen to Elvis Costello, I look for rhyme. Reason. In the words I put on paper. In many different trajectories at once.

A divine ending: 35 minutes of this dismal pink and grey Martha Stewart in the 90s vomit space. There's no time, in life, to bounce back from horrific mistakes. I suppose attempt to make as few dramatic ones as possible? but it's becoming, melancholily enough, rather "Sartreian": say you do it all right. Say you mess up, miss some time. Say you're sitting in the back and are afraid and are not the sort of person who would walk out of a recitation straight into a love affair or maritime adventure.
What -- or more optimistically, WHERE -- is the point?