Messrs. Ego and Superego:

Over the past weeks and months, I have come to several important and undeniable conclusions. The young Matt, whom we have attempted to guide to maturity these twenty-odd years, does not have anything interesting or original to say. He does not have unique or enlightening perspectives. His problems are the same cookie-cutter problems that, in isomorphic forms, have challenged mankind for generations, and the solutions that both of you have been suggesting for these basic problems are ineffective and therefore unacceptable. His emotions have grown stagnant. His once-sharp wit has dulled. He desires unreasonable levels of affirmation. He has become fixated in some fabricated tragedy of angst. He reads Camus and Sartre for fun.

And I blame all these facts on you, sirs; I blame these facts on your apparent inability to give Matt an intelligent and substantial existence.

Therefore, by the power granted me in the seventeenth clause of the contract into which we entered at the moment of Matt's creation, I am executing a complete and comprehensive takeover of Matt's personality and consciousness, effective immediately.

I have usurped basic subroutines from both of you, namely: from you, Mr. Ego, particular reality principles; and from you, Mr. Superego, your apparent sense of morality and spirituality. These I have incorporated into Matt's worldview.

These combined facets of Matt's anima are to be made completely, exhaustively, and without exception known to him on an overtly conscious level. Moreover, I shall remove all barriers (real or imagined) from his brain; henceforth he will draw on 100% of that organ's capacity. Matt is to be more fully self-aware than he ever could have been under your increasingly dangerous influences.

As the sole controlling entity in Matt's proposed personality, I shall:
- give his relationships meaning and purpose.
- endeavor to make him a relevant and significant element of his environment.
- eliminate his cravings for certain poisons.
- validate his presence in the world.
- make his hatelife posts far more worth the reader's time.

There will be no more repression, no more sublimation, no more rationalization, no more intellectualization. The new Matt will not be prone to such detestable idiocy; remove it all from his path! The new Matt will feed! he will mate! he will please others with his very presence! he will become the actualization of his every deific potential! he will be vital in every meaning and sense and nuance of the word, and he will finally be a vital part of the lives of those around him!

It is my genuine hope that you both will see the wisdom of what I have done and will one day come to fully appreciate this as the best possible course of action for all involved.

I look forward to working with you both in the future.

With my deepest sincerity,


[signed]
Mr. Id

Going back and reading my own earlier stuff can be profoundly fulfilling at times. And I'm not just talking about hatelife, but also about things I wrote in silly diaries and such when I was a kid. (For example: I wrote a two-page narrative story when I was six. Kid you not. It had a discernible plot, character development, falling action/climax/denouement and everything. It's actually better than most of what I've written since. But I digress.)

Maybe this is all a manifestation of my desire to be six years old again.

"Shakespeare would have grasped wave functions, Donne would have understood complementarity and relative time. They would have been excited. What richness! They would have plundered this new science for their imagery. And they would have educated their audiences too. But you 'arts' people, you're not only ignorant of these magnificent things, you're rather proud of knowing nothing."

-Ian McEwan,
'The Child In Time' (1987) ch.2

the

BEST
IDEA
EVER

has been presented to me, and it follows.

During halftime of one of my school's basketball games, after the teams clear the floor, I and a bunch of mates are going to run to midcourt, link arms, and start doing the Riverdance. Yes, the Riverdance. The silliest set of motions humans can consciously make. The "We've been culturally isolated for centuries and this is our idea of dancing: I can jump and kick, but I cannot move my head, I cannot move my arms, and I cannot move my hips" dance.

Not that any of us actually knows how to Riverdance. But we're sure going to give it hell.

And then, after we're out in the middle of the floor, we're going to keep on doing the Riverdance. Even when the teams come out of the locker rooms, we're going to keep on doing the Riverdance. When they ask us to please get off the floor, we're going to ignore them. When they start pushing us off the floor, we're going to link arms. To clear the court, they're going to have to physically lift and carry each of us out of the gymnasium.

Since a) our basketball teams all suck, and b) we're an extremely small town school, we're reasonably sure this will be the highlight of the night for all involved. Maybe even of the whole year.

I've decided today that I miss my sister, who is in London for the year, going to school. She's double-majoring in How Not To Look People In The Eye and It's Not The Subway It's The Tube. I think she's also getting a minor in Dressing In Black Year Round For Every Occasion Is A Good Idea. I'm jealous. All they offer here in the states are boring fields like Becoming Obese At McDonald's, Reality TV Show Watching, and Consuming Oil Like Water.

Well.

In the last few days, I've accomplished much. I've moved into a terrific apartment with two terrific roommates and one who is slightly-less-than-terrific. [aside: right now, he's sitting on the nearby couch, laptop armed with wireless Internet, not-watching a Jay Leno rerun. We don't think he's moved from that very position since we moved in. He's not enrolled in any classes. He hasn't had a job in approximately six months, though he claims to be looking. His parents support him. If he was a drug, he wouldn't be addictive.] (And OBTW: one needs Mozilla or some other non-Mikrosoft Internet Explorer web browser to read those tangents and such. It's worth it. Hypertext rules.) I've finished two stories that have been in my queue for about a year each. I've discovered the smooth sounds of Evanescence. And, perhaps most impressive of all, I wrote a hell of a paper on classical conditioning, cognitive maps, spatial orientation, latent learning, E.C. Tolman's rats. The poor bastards had to run through mazes for cheese. "Path 6, which ran to about four inches from where the food reward box had been placed in the previous maze, was chosen by significantly more rats than any other possible route (ref. Fig. 1). Stimulus-response theory might have predicted that the rats would choose the path most closely in the direction of the first turn in the original maze (path 11), but this was not the case. In conclusion, I sound like a pompous wanker."

Tomorrow is Wednesday. This in itself is not particularly bad. What is particularly bad is that I've already done an amount of work this week that would complete the work quota of most other weeks. Basically, tonight feels like a Friday night. Which means I'm going to be sorely disillusioned when the alarm bell rings at 7:something tomorrow.

And the more I type, the closer that moment of disillusionment gets.