Venting and Ranting

Rrrgh. Where to start? Perhaps with "I shouldn't have stayed up so late last night finishing that book?" That makes sense. Though I really did need to distract myself with something. MUCKing wasn't working. MMOs weren't working. And while I wanted to just go to sleep early, that wasn't happening.

I was given this nice, holiday weekend and I just haven't been able to enjoy it. Too many toxic thoughts killing my mood...

A lot of it comes around to the usual "mid-life crisis" questioning of purpose stuff. That invariably comes up when I'm depressed. It's frustrating because I'm consciously content with my life. I'm mostly healthy. I'm more financially-stable than most people I know. I don't really have any desire for children (heck, I don't even like people a lot of the time). Yet part of me still clings to that subtle influence of upbringing that taught life is going to school, getting a job, getting married, and raising kids. Meanwhile, another little voice is a little less focused on the tradition and just harasses me over my utter lack of ambition and points out my chosen life has no real purpose or validation. I'm not carrying on a family legacy, or even contributing to the gene pool. At best, I'm a cog in the machine of society that functions cleanly. Most of the time, I'm fine with that.

I've also found political discussions to be rather depressing of late, and they seem almost unavoidable from being everywhere in the news to coming up in talk with parents or friends only. Ugh. Seriously, I find I'm only able to stand more than a few minutes of it when on something like the Daily Show or Colbert Report - and that has less to do with the opinions being pitched and more to do with comedy/parody blunting the near-nauseating truth of matters.
I am not the idealistic liberal I once was. I've come to feel that people paying their "fair share" gets to be a gray area quickly, I feel that government is too large and unwieldy with wasteful bureacratic fluff. For all those changes, I still tend to come down on the Democratic side, but more in a "lesser of evils" sense. A few comments on my mind of late:
- If you think closed-minded conservatism is scary because it's backed by lots of money, you're missing a very big point. There is a large percentage of the population that believes we're all better off this way. It isn't just companies or "rich people." People tend to ensconce themselves in an envelope of those with similar views and they lose sight of how different people can be.
- It's awful hard for moderate/tolerant views to fight back against the extremists because... they're moderate/tolerant. If you truly believe others have a right to form their own opinions, it's at least a bit hypocritical to call them "wrong." And if you're an activist of any sort, you're probably not as tolerant as you think.
- I find the whole American governmental system to be screwed, perhaps beyond the point of redemption now. Oh, I can't point to anything I'm convinced is better, but it's grown such that any attempt to control or watch over parts makes the whole system more complex and harder to keep in check. The realities of holding an office, any office, undermine they way the powers of the office should be used. The parties have become too busy trying to grasp for the power to do things to get anything done. But for all that, I feel it's a deeper, societal problem. We've become so quick to blame and slow to take responsibility, neighbors are strangers rather than friends, and taking a few seconds to be considerate to others in any small way is a fading art.
Honestly, any time I think about all of this stuff, I'm glad I wasn't born any later.

And, hey, I've been writing this while running diagnostics to repair a computer downed by malware. Whee!

Yes, people fucking suck.