I Want You to Think I'm Wise

I’m imagining you reading this, thinking I’m clever or insightful or sagacious.

I suspect there’s a kind of arrogance to many writers. It’s a kind of arrogance to think I have anything to say, me with my bachelor’s degree and my fondness for Naruto.

I hate how everything needs qualified. So much punchier to say that writers are arrogant, rather than many writers. But I am addicted to linguistic precision. Not that I’m likely to OD from it. Did you like my witticism there? Don’t, it wasn’t very good.

I don’t think I should be writing. I don’t think I’m wise enough. I just want to seem wise.

So much of my trouble comes from being different people all the time. Oh they all have the same name, same history. But what they want, how they think, what they crave, it all couldn’t be further from each other. I cycle between ascetic and hedonist, cold loner and dancing lover, cruel mastermind and beneficent sage. I wish I could just want the same thing for twenty-four hours in a row. My personality has a Pink Panther and Little Man vibe, the different aspects of who I am trying to establish themselves and erase the others. They don’t much like each other.

Life is unreasonable. There’s no way around it perhaps. But one gets trained to be a doctor. One reads the user manual before operating a piece of machinery. One gets do overs for difficult things. We hardly expect the first pancake to be flawless.

But we don’t really get to practice for life. I know that’s what childhood is supposed to be before you’re a real adult, but let’s be honest: if you fuck up your childhood you’re likely to fuck up your adulthod, and you don’t get to practice for childhood. Sometimes I think I was doomed by second grade, or even earlier. On the wrong path, and I never found my way back. Wrong, fundamentally. Not necessarily useless, but flawed.

Then again, flaws are…goal oriented. A good screwdriver makes for a terrible microwave.