for every posting on this blog, there are one or two posts that never make it as public veiwing because i am dissatisfied by the writing style, the subject, or both. sometimes i write very private and embarassing things and don’t have the guts to post them. but i keep all entries saved and reference them from time to time because it’s always fun to remember how the mind was working at a different time in the past. sometimes, it’s tough to believe that it was actually me who wrote some of these reject entries.

i found an entry from the early days of my blog that never quite made it because after i wrote it, i had issues with the term i had devised: “midday crisis.” it was contrived in such an artificial way – i had heard “quarter-life crisis” in a john mayer song and was, simultaneously, having a crappy day – so i wanted to feel clever and told myself that my “midday crisis” would come and go. the entry contained “scenarios” as examples of a “midday crisis,” and although they seem to concern greater issues with life as a college student, i found it interesting to read about the things that bothered me last year. in fact, these thoughts seem even more relevant today:

(taken from posting in April 2004)

examples of midday crisis scenarios

1. sitting in a class lecture, not really paying attention, you wonder why you bothered to show up in the first place. then you go on to think about how useless most of the education really is. this gets you thinking about how you waste your parents’ money and how pointless college really is.

2. you’re reading for your research paper. you have three thick books. you try your best to get through them all, but even as you’re reading them, you realize you’ll never know enough about the topic. then you wonder how pitiful your paper will be and how fruitless it is to write on a topic that has probably been written about by some smarter, more qualified scholar. you don’t want to write anymore and the topic sickens you.

3. as an involved member of the campus community, you recognize that more than half the student body really don’t give a hoot about what goes on. you wonder why you’re so active and if there really is a point to it all except those fleeting moments of self-satisfaction and some compliments thrown at you by peers doing the same thing. you realize what you do is nothing great, but mostly out of self-interest. you wonder if you should reply to those emails and carry out tasks you have decided to be responsible for.

there’s something nice about salvaging a piece of writing that, otherwise, would have been forever forgotten. it’s like claiming back the few minutes (or even a few hours) that you might have spent thinking up something and putting it down into words. it’s also assuring to know that what you once thought in the past, whether it was days ago, months ago, or even years ago, can still make sense today.