Red - The Blood of Angry Men

I find a lot of things about life amusing. The fact that I can't think of any of them right now doesn't make them any less real.

I spend a lot of my existence wanting to be witty. I feel it adds a certain positivity to the world, without which existence would be worse for everyone. The way I see it, life is not naturally pleasurable. One must make it so.

There are people I know who get a kick out of life. They live from day to day, waking up everyone morning with a broad grin on their face about the day to come. They do stuff that makes them happy, and even when they're doing stuff that doesn't automatically contribute to their happiness, their thinking makes it so. Or they have other things, the happiness from which tides them over until the next happy-making exercise.

I want to be one of those people. In contrast, I feel that I am riding life, in a way which is generally enjoyable, occasionally scary, and once in a while offering of opportunities which make everything that little bit more interesting. But I have trouble in believing that there is some kind of overall wholeness in my life, some kind of unifying force that brings everything together so that I can say: "I live for [thing]".

I have a feeling that this is a question of personality, and that wanting to change probably can't make it so. I can probably read any number of self-help books which will tell me the opposite, but I'm also a fatalist. So I believe that not only can't I change, but that this inability to change is predestined by a higher power.

I just got back from a "chocolate party". Everyone that was to be eaten was made with chocolate. And I ate a lot of chocolate. And I realised, at some point, that I really wanted to eat something more savoury, and that the chocolate wasn't really making me feel good. Those people who tell you that you can have too much of a good thing ... with them I would disagree, as I don't believe that chocolate has ever been a really good thing for me. It is merely one of the many socially encouraged but personally repulsive habits which I have taken on in the course of my life, like smoking. It just probably won't give me cancer.

I have a morbid, unqualified, unquestioning respect for doctors. It seems to me that they have access to a body of knowledge that I am so far removed from, that I know so little about, that I am prepared to put myself in their hands based on absolutely blind faith. I am full of blind faith. I willingly throw myself and my fate into the hands of others, and give them absolute control over my destiny. I guess it's because then I can blame them if it works out wrong. Or perhaps it's just another unchangeable part of my personality, for which there is no good reason. But doctors in particular. They're just so ... medical. I should probably have studied medicine, just so that I could have faith in myself.

But instead, I studied law, for pretty much the same reasons. I wanted to know how it worked. I wanted to never again be in a situation where because I didn't know how things worked, I ended up cold, embarrassed and alone. And eventually I figured out that it's not really knowing how things worked that makes you end up neither cold, embarrassed or alone (although it helps). It is choosing not to be cold, embarrassed and alone. That's pretty much all it takes. And it all works itself out from there.

So go out there. Love one another. You know what, do whatever, I don't care. I'm passive aggressive, and proud of it.