Socializing is something at which I’ve never really excelled. Six months ago, I would have just considered myself an elitist, arrogant asshole and gone on with my life. But that’s not it at all. Sure, I’ve never exactly been Mr. Fuzzy-Wuzzy Cupcake-Baker Party-Planner Friend-Maker, but I don’t intentionally try and cause any sort of pain or discomfort to neutral parties. I’m not *mean*. I’m just tired.

Sometimes it just feels like the pacing is all off, you know? Some moments can feel like a thousand years of fire and light condensed into a glimmer of happiness, of emotion, that the world never notices. Only I do. Other times, weeks and months go by when everyone else is making friends, changing jobs, learning, experiencing, enjoying life. And I don’t experience any of that. Only the boredom and the drudgery of making it through the days.

Is it because I’m alone that I experience such a disjointed and scattered existence? Perhaps, I think, if I had friends, real friends, honest friends, the pacing might be a little more even. Less like an emission spectrum and more like a continuous one. Except the element in question would be my happiness and the range of possible wavelengths would be my life.

There’s so much inside me that wants to follow rules, that wants to live by someone else’s guidelines. It’s how I was brought up, I think. But there’s so much I could experience and learn, I could be so much freer, if I went my own way. But to understand what that way is…

It’s sort of like I’m in a forest at night, and I can only judge things by touch, by sound. And I want to be able to see, I want to be able to say, “This is how things are. This is the way the world works. This is how I succeed. This is what life means.” But I can’t. It’s not even that I can’t see the answer, it’s that there isn’t one, and yet I don’t have a choice but to keep trying. To keep failing. Even when I have no reason to keep trying, no reason to keep going, I do. I keep going. Fumbling in the dark. I have no choice, because I’m alive. And that’s what living people do.

Here’s the problem. I’m the person who needs to define everything. I’m the person who starts every proof with definitions and uses nothing but axioms. To me, there is no middle ground. There are the things we know, for sure, unfailingly, and there are the things that are lost in the fog of half-truths and obfuscations. But what do we know, for sure, about living?

There are things that exist. I exist. You exist. Water exists. Air exists.

We know they interact in certain ways. We have the laws of physics. So we can predict things. We can say “if A, with mass m and velocity v collides with a stationary B with mass m’, then whatthefuckever.” And that gives us power.

And that leads to even more, greater, possibilities. We can predict how people will act in times of crisis. We can predict whether entire economies will boom or bust, rise or fall. We can predict the motions of the planets, the stars, the galaxies. We have incredible power of prediction. But what is power without purpose?

What is knowledge without application?

What are people without direction? Without a goal? What are we, ultimately? And this cycle of life and death, joy and sadness, struggle and failure and success and promises and trust and anger and fear — what is it all for?

Let me tell you what I want.

I want to be happy. I want to be safe. I want to be able to eat a juicy piece of fruit every day of my life. I want color. I want the sky, open and free. I want accessible knowledge. I want to learn something, every day. I want music. I want a friend — one is enough.

I don’t want to be constrained by others. All the should’s and the have to’s and must’s. You can keep your expectations, sir. I don’t need them. Why should I care whether somebody else is happy with the way I live my life? It’s my life. Mine! And it’s all I have. So don’t you dare fucking try and take it from me.

Like I said, I’m not a mean person. But caged animals get angry before they get docile. I’m not going to be the lonely tiger at the zoo with sad eyes, who wishes he were somewhere else, somewhere free. I’m going to stay mean as long as it takes for me to get what I want. And I want to be free.

I hate the word “love” by the way. It’s overused, it’s hackneyed, it gets on my nerves whenever I hear it said. Unfortunately, I’ll be using it many times throughout this post. Aaaaand herewego.

So I watched the entire Peach Girl series yesterday. It’s aimed at high-school and younger teenage girls. I, of course, loved it. All 25 episodes and I couldn’t stop.

Here’s the thing. True love is a bunch of bullshit. Loving only one person is, similarly, a bunch of bullshit. Momo loved both Toji and Kairu, and Toji and Kairu both loved Momo. But, the thing is, it would logistically impossible for them to share her.

Love is between two people only because two people is the easiest, strongest, simplest type of relationship. I love you, you love me. We’re in love. It works. It’s easy. When I was younger (high school), I wanted to be in love. I yearned for it. For someone, let’s say, worthy. I always expected that if I truly was in love and knew it, for sure, then it would be reciprocated. Well I was, and, well, it wasn’t. For one, the guy was straight. And it bothered me. Because I’d grown up with the idea that you only love one person ever, and if that person gets away your chance is lost. Forever. And you’d grow up to be a lonely old hag with seventeen cats and no real relationships.

Loving, I’ve come to realize, is not reciprocal by definition. Even if it is, it doesn’t always work out. It doesn’t have to. Love is not “I need you”, it’s “I want to see you happy.” And, of course, part of that requires some form of contact (the seeing). This is because love, like everything else, is selfish. Self-serving. An investment in one’s own happiness (the happier you are, the happier I am). Why does this happen? Similar values, seeing the success of a similar lifestyle or intellectual character. Such things. This also means that love does not require a relationship.

Another thing. Love cannot be forced. To this, you might say, “But of course!” But then imagine, would you love your family if you truly believed this?

I’ve been counting, actually. The people I love. There are four I can say for certain now. Two in high school. One in middle school. One in elementary school.

It has nothing to do with sexual attraction either. Really. Nothing. Out of the eight total, five of them are girls.

I really want to make a list. I love making lists. But I don’t know who will read this.

Why am I doing all of this? Why am I going to school? Why am I stressing myself out?

Why don’t I just major in music? Honestly, it would be easier. It would be a hell of a lot easier. But I have to remind myself of The Goal. The Reason I’m Doing This.

To please my family? Perhaps, partly. To make a decent income after I graduate? Perhaps, partly. But if those were the only reasons, I would have quit long ago. There’s more to it than just me.

See, our world has issues. Wars, poverty, starvation, disease. Economy crumbling. And what’s the cause of all these issues? Is there a single if-I-had-to-choose-one-I-would-choose-this-one cause? Is there a single most-of-the-world’s-problems-could-potentially-be-encapsulated-in-this-lone-phrase cause? Answer: Yes. And what is this cause? Lack of communication.

But not communication in the ordinary sense of the word. The mundane sense. Political party talks. UN meetings. Scientific conferences. There’s much of that going around already (maybe not enough, but There’s Much). What I’m talking about is not communication in the mundane sense, but communication in the personal sense. In the heartfelt sense. We can put together statistics of people dying of AIDS in Africa, but that doesn’t show you the magnitude of the situation. How can we, as external observers, ever understand the magnitude of the situation? How can we understand the life of a Chicago street beggar? What do they feel, what do they think? Should we stop and ask them?

Not to discount the value of statistics (I’m a mathematician after all… then again, statisticians aren’t really mathematicians), but they never tell you the whole story. How can they? It’s easy to know some things are true. The Euler phi function of a prime p is equal to p-1. The Laplace transform of 1 is 1/s. The Ideal Gas Law? Easy… PV=nRT. But how can we know if someone else is really hurting inside? That the bearded man sitting on the bench at Adams was lonely?

How can we know who needs help the most? And how can we know how to reward those who do the most to help others? How can we ever be sure of Us, of The Way We Are? Are we heading in The Right Direction? How will we ever know if our misstep made tragedy for someone on the other side of the world? Not all of the algorithms of Life are stable; sometimes a small change of input can lead to disaster. And with the earth’s population continually growing, we are bound to step on each other’s toes now more than ever.

Most of all, though, how do we know where to go from here? We can’t listen to everyone’s thoughts at once, not yet. We go forward in certainty unless we’re all aware and we all are certain, unless we all understand and we all contribute. And while technology improves, almost anyone can realize that we are only growing farther apart, like the stars in our cold universe.

We have the power, we have the skill, we have the knowledge, but we need The Direction. And so it becomes not a technological problem, not a physical problem, not an academic problem, but a social problem. THE Social Problem.

I don’t have much time to elaborate now (homework to do, surprise), but I’ll remind you of a related post, from nearly a year ago.

It’s called Wireless Internet Capabilities. http://blacknixdreaming.com/archives/128

This is why I’m here. I’d like to bring us closer together. How, I’m not quite sure. But if I can help, then the world has my mind, my eyes and my hands.