Pressure Cooker

I was wasting time on the internet, when I came across a Frozen gif of the animated snowman saying, "some people are worth melting for". The notion is so romantic- and I thought, "I wish I had someone to melt for".

From there I somehow came to the conclusion that--- like it or not, we're all melting regardless- albeit much slower than a snowman. The pressures of this world are eating us raw, and gnawing on the bones underneath our exposed and festering wounds. I don't know if it's fair for my woes to compete with the woes of the third world- I have food, water, electricity, an education- and I'm not really fearful of dying of AIDs or Ebola the next day. For those of us in the first world, who have had their basic tier of needs satisfied, I feel like we are more plagued by abstract concepts conjured by our own minds. Once you become educated you start questioning things like morality, religion and philosophical value- and you sort of get tangled once again as you try to figure out right vs wrong, whether God is real and whether your reason of existence is valid. Why do we do this to ourselves?

I'm looking at a chart for Maslow's Hierachy of Needs, and I don't think I agree with his tier system completely. I concede that physiological needs must first be satisfied- but beyond that I think the pyramid loses its definition, as people want different things and you can't really apply this model only when it suits you. Is self-actualization even a real thing? Why bother having theoretical concepts if it is never to be achieved? I suppose it acts the same way candles work on a cake. It looks pretty, and the cake's value increases. When the cake is eaten, however, the candles go into the trash and you kind of wonder why we went there in the first place.

This has become a really weird rant. Maybe because it's past midnight and I haven't started on the many pages of tutorial notes I need to write by tomorrow. My creepy landlord is upping his creepiness- and he's complaining about our power consumption. Why did I ever think it was acceptable to live with a landlord in a cockroach infested house in the first place? Never mind that though- I have to deal with the phone calls from back "home", where my mother is constantly pressing the matter of whether or not I'm depressed, because I sound depressed. Look, I use the word "depressed" very freely and I mean it in a non-clinical sense. If I had clinical depression I probably would've never graduated. Just because I get driven up the wall and feel terrible at times doesn't mean I need to be interrogated by my mother on whether I'm depressed or not. It adds to my frustrations. So what, hypothetically speaking, if I was depressed? What's anyone going to do about it? I'm not going to break down so I can get attention and sympathy- I want to try hard enough to pass my classes and learn to enjoy life. I'm not saying depressed people are trying to get attention and sympathy, by the way--- I'm just saying that if I said I was depressed, it'd simply be attention seeking behaviour as opposed to anything else- I don't even meet half the diagnostic criteria.

Between dealing with my ever-annoying landlord who is harassing my house mate and I about this and that, as well as my slowly but steadily growing pile of school work--- I think it's an absolute wonder that I still find time on my hands to ponder if there is someone out there, worth melting for. You know... if breakdown is inevitable, and our icy structures will be reduced to no more than a puddle- it would be so much more heroic to meltdown for someone or something. Is that how all Great People achieved things? Melt for the world around them before they were slowly evaporated?

Oh lord this is a strange night.