04/02/2002 - 6:31 p.m.

I'm sinking in the quagmire of illusions and Thoreau

Lots of slightly dirty jokes in my day today. I'd write them all down, but it'd take too long, and anyway, they were all very involved and probably not that funny in retrospect. At the time they were though, so just be glad of that.

I am such a compulsive liar. I mean, I don't lie about big things, and I don't do it to be deceitful, I do it just 'cause it's more pleasant than hearing for the zillionth time what I already know: I'm an irresponsible forgetful slacker (well, you try living my life, remember the list of things I have to do in a night and balance that with the list of things I want to do in a night, don't you think I've got pretty good odds at forgetting something?).

Last Thursday, I was supposed to get a whole bunch of application stuff turned into the registrar at school, and I forgot, so I told her I'd done it. Well, this isn't a big deal, because the amount of time the registrar hangs onto the app. stuff is totally undisclosed (she mails it herself since I supposedly gave her stamps), and it just means I have to do it ASAFP. I just sort of feel like I ought to feel guilty (I don't, but I feel I ought to). I told absolute lies to my French teacher about where my homework actually was- I hadn't done it at all, forgot completely, but I told her I'd just done it on some paper that wasn't at school. These I don't feel so bad about.

My question is- should I feel guilty? Should even tiny little lies have an effect on me? I don't know. I'm not sure whether this bothers me yet or not.

What does bother me (I just read Dinner With Friends) is that we live in a society that keeps asking such odd questions. It's almost like we feel that since we've asked (philosophically speaking) "who am I?" and "what am I doing here?", that we also feel the need to ask (philosophically speaking) "is my butt big?" and "so, where is this relationship really going?" Are these questions we ask because they need answering, or because we feel the need to put some sort of justification on everything?

We've been reading a lot of political philosophy in Government this week. I've come to the conclusion that it is definately not good for me. I have my own silly little ideas and I don't want anybody else coming along to mess them all up. It's not enlightening, it's just annoying, because I don't have any idea where these ideas fit, or whether I want them to fit. They just kind of sit there under bolded titles Rousseau, Locke, Aquinas (which, I'm sorry, his logic is messed up), and I don't really know what I think. The topper on this was the paradoxal theories of some guy who wrote in the 60's and 70's (Manneier, or something to that effect), and he says that America's problem is that we're all trying to please everyone, but we know when we start out that it won't work, but we want to try it anyway. If at first you don't succeed, keep trying until you do, basically. And the problem is that it keeps working out for us, holisticly.

It was too much for 8AM on a Monday.