Me, Me, Me

Lately I've begun to wonder if I have become a robot. A slack-jawed, faintly happy boy who moves from task to task with no real inspiration but preciseness and lines of correct thinking. In one sense, I'm the same as I ever was. People see in me whatever they've always seen in me. I could entertain what I believe those qualities to be, but here is not the forum for that discussion. I have similar interests, the same motivational forces and in all likelihood a superior grasp of what I want my life to be and where I think it's going. Maybe that's the problem. The joy of late-night blogging in high school was that a) late-night was 9 pm and b) I possessed a more speculative nature. Now that I know more things, have I lost my way? The answer is no. Despite the glazed-over feeling I get, I'm confident I do mostly know what I'm doing. I have my faults, but I'm coming to accept them rather than rail about them and do nothing. You could tell me I should work to improve myself, and I believe it's a good idea but if I'm not motivated to improve myself even during my worst bouts of self-loathing, why bother loathing myself at all?

If we have to talk about a personal problem, here's one. Like anyone, I want to be an alpha male.



I can't stand to feel inferior to other people in any sense. I don't know if this is because I'm insecure or because I think strangers are awful. The latter is if anything, less reassuring. Yet my conception of myself as an alpha male inherently involves only self-pleasure. Let's call it the Kirill axiom. I can act the way I really want to and it'll be fun for awhile but I'm inevitably going to be seduced by social pressures. The fact of the matter is that the standard alpha male on a college campus is a womanizer, a drunk, and an all-around asshole. So the question that begs itself is obvious. Alpha Jeremiah would be considered an alpha male by about the same amount of people that consider me an alpha male at the current moment. My eccentricities would be too much for people who didn't know me to handle. My friends would still consider me a friend but whether they like me more or less is meaningless. It's the others I want to impress.

What I'm getting at is my problem with myself in college: I don't stand out. I don't think I've ever really stood out but at least in high school, I logically represented a much higher percentage of what the average person in school was thinking about. I was one of sixty instead of one of 1500. You know the guy who sits behind me in class who wears a Ninja Turtles bandanna and a nose ring? I want him to look at me, someone he's never met, and say "Damn, what a guy." The extent of my desire for gratification is beyond all limits. I'm not going to say I shouldn't care at all what people think about me because you can always take things too far. I do care what people close to me think of me and I think I should care. Why do I want to be beloved by strangers? That's the real question.