Don't ask.

I lack the means to account for myself. This is a fairly recent realization, and a troubling one for a guy who prides himself on a high degree of self-awareness. No matter how many times I take stock of my frailties and weaknesses (every few days or so, at this point) I arrive no closer to reasoning my way through anything. Not because I’m deeply complex or layered, but rather that I am utterly inexplicable. There are surely no reasonable explanations for most of my major failings. I love to write and I have ample time to do so, I don’t mind housework at all, I’m truly fascinated by my courses and I feel great when I’m in shape.

Yet here I am, slowly gaining weight as I sit stationary in my messy apartment, skipping classes as each passing day adds to the years since I’ve finished any meaningful writing. Worst of all, though, is that this all persists despite my full knowledge of how disproportionate to my problems the ease of the solution really is. It’s simple; all my problems would melt away if I just quit being so lazy. It’s so obvious that it kills my attempts at self-reflection. I can’t reason through my laziness because it’s utterly irrational. My reflection ends quickly with, “This is it, on this day of all days I will stop being so lazy and I will finally make something of myself!”. It sounds silly, sure, but it’s really the only coherent conclusion. And, of course, I always fail, and find myself in the same situation just a few days later.

This came up when my wife directed me to two excellent essays on procrastination by John Perry. For whatever reason reading myself described so thoroughly by a man I’ve never met momentarily inspired me to fix one of my many ongoing failures. You’re reading the result.

I promised myself that I would begin this blog three months ago. I would throw myself into my writing and make an honest effort to develop my talents. It’s not too long now before I will be expected to make responsible, grown up decisions regarding my direction in life. This was to be part of my greater effort to make one last push toward my childhood dream of becoming a writer before resigning myself to the sensible life and going to law school or something equally boring. I was fired up and ready to go, armed with countless ideas I felt fairly certain I could write about.

All I needed was a name for my blog. Cue the next three idle months.

Why would I postpone my one final push toward my dreams over something so stupid as a title? Dr. Perry has a point, probably, that I’m some sort of secret perfectionist. I do nothing if I cannot make it perfect, and so I do nothing. Yet I wonder if this is the sort of after-the-fact rationalization that I love to use to explain away my many internal contradictions. The truth is I stand guilty with no defence. Even the concept of a neurosis makes far too much sense for what’s going on here. Oh, I’m sure there’s some sort of genetic or psychological origin for whatever the hell’s wrong with me. But the truth is none of that matters now.

Before we develop the cognitive capability to truly decide anything for ourselves, we’re already a hodgepodge of irrational foibles. So many of the things that influence who we become know nothing of reason, and they certainly don’t combine in any sort of coherent manner. And with nothing coherent to point to as some sort of rational cause for all my failings, I have no choice but to become defensive, to build grand narratives in my mind about why I am the way I am.

The fact that we grow from absurd soil affects us socially, too. Before we get a chance to take any stock of what’s actually useful or valuable to us, we’ve already built families and societies that make no sort of sense whatsoever. And we become defensive about that as well. Hell, we go to war over that.

Take a common argument between my wife and me for example. She quite inexplicably moved from beautiful San Diego to my home in Edmonton, Alberta to be with me. She often complains to me about the weather and incredulously asks why anyone would live here. I, of course, become defensive and accuse her of being a ‘west coast elitist,’ of sorts. I claim that because she was so lucky to be born affluent in a beautiful city like San Diego, she’s come to assume that there must be something ‘wrong’ with anyone who doesn’t live on the American west coast or in, like, New York or something. I defensively argue that she belittles different people with different backgrounds and roots and who value different things. But really, I'm just upset that my home is such bullshit.

I mean, when an Albertan child asks, “Why are we here?” we’re not taking our first stabs at some sort of existential reflection. We really want to know, why are we the fuck here? Why NOT San Diego, for God's sake? There must be some sort of rational explanation for such a seemingly inexplicable and outright stupid choice. It would be of some comfort to discover that we are the descendents of murderers and thieves who escaped to the barren north in hopes that no respectable lawman would dream follow them into such an inhospitable wasteland. I mean, let’s be straight here, this shit is extreme. Factoring in wind chill we experienced -51 degrees last winter. That’s –60 for you Americans. People become hermits. No one ever goes anywhere. The prices on fresh fruits and vegetables triple, but it doesn’t matter; like fuck you want to go grocery shopping anyway. The roads become death traps. Your car won’t even start.

Why do people live here? Why, even after the ‘momentary inspiration’ I spoke of earlier, did it take me two weeks to write this? I don’t have any goddamn idea. Though maybe Dr. Perry’s right after all—I’m only finishing this because I’m putting off writing a paper that’s already two days late. That certainly fits with his description of structured procrastination. But describing the structure of something certainly doesn’t answer the question of why. Which is really what I want to know. Why the fuck why am I like this? Given that the world's so technological and scientific these days, I feel like we've lost the ability to account for things so...random.

So I, like my city, stand guilty with no defence. I’m certainly inexplicable, but not in any sort of quirky way that will make this blog any fun to read. It will also be an incoherent hodgepodge. If that sounds like something you’d like to read, then by all means bookmark me. But I’ll probably end up abandoning this, my last push toward my childhood dreams, in lieu of playing endless amounts of Peggle.

And I hate Peggle.

Also, my wife and I decided I should name this after a New Yorker caption we found amusing. It’s hardly perfect, but it exists. So that’s a start.