word of the day

Zugunruhe: migratory restlessness; the migratory drive in animals, especially birds

The 4 mournful rings of the clock are just a vague memory now, the metallic gongs floating around lazily throughout and around my mind, nearly lost in the hazy chambers of sleepy thought. The digital alarm clock on my desk blinks the time at me, signaling through his worrisome blinks that 5 a.m. is fast approaching. When the time comes I’ll get no metallic gonging from him, just red mournful blinks.

Pathetic fallacy, I think is the name of what I just did. Attributing human emotions or responses to inanimate things. The clock is mournful? I begin to suspect that I’m going mad. Mournful blinks? I speculate that I’m actually just projecting my own emotional data onto the clock in some psychologically complex scheme in order to imagine sympathy from my physical context. Interpreting the data of my perfectly neutral surroundings to match my own emotions. Well, at least someone agrees with me, even if it is just a clock...

It’s a little late to be pursuing my destiny, admittedly, but alas, sometimes one has to fit it in where he can. I like calling my work "pursuit of destiny"; it has a certain gravitas to it. So I pursue it. The tasks at hand are unfinished. They call for order, hard work, pain-staking midnight-oil--burning diligence. They command me to lean studiously over my desk and pore over every last word on every last page of every last project. I lean back in my chair and with some effort prop my feet on my bookshelf. Heavy eyelids cover my eyes in long, weary blinks. To my left my desk, heavy-laden with stacks of papers all clamoring for my attention. To my right the open window, opened to a dark cool silent world outside, not clamoring for my attention, not uttering a word.

“I’m pursuing my destiny” is what I tell myself because I know that if I don’t then I won’t finish the paper and if I don’t finish the paper I’ll get bad grades and if I get bad grades I’ll end up working fast-food, halfway through a degree that was probably unmarketable anyway. My claim of destiny-pursuit keep me focused. It may or may not be true, but who cares—it gets my papers done. Foma, Kurt Vonnegut would call it. Convenient fiction. As if writing a paper of recycled ideas is in any way connected to destiny. Destiny my foot. It’s structure I’ve imposed on my mind to get things done.

It’s 9 till 5 and before I’m finished rambling my thoughts will be shattered again by the metallic rings of the wall clock down the hall. Probably what I’ll realize when I finish rambling is that if I were pursuing my real destiny I’d be a bit closer to a ring and a 9-5. That’s what people tell me anyway. And I’ll concede that they’re probably right. But I still steadfastly maintain that it’ll take me a while to see how exactly they’re right. I’m still biding my time. Now is the time to float around lazily in exploration, trying to figure out which end is up, what I believe, and all those other explorations allowed to the young. If you’re still in that exploratory stage, “settle down” is a bad word, worthy of getting your mouth soaped. Now is the time to indulge in wanderlust until it has run its course.

It’s a dark cool silent world outside, not clamoring for my attention. And I’m not clamoring for its attention. Right now I just ingest the sound of silence, stumbling through the hazy chambers of my own thought and hoping that in time the destiny will be uncovered and so will my eyes.

What I’ve got to offer the world is no ring, just weary but worry-free red-eyed blinks and the promise to do something useful with my existence within the next decade.