I'm half-way through my holidays and I can honestly say that I've accomplished very, very little. I did a little bit of studying and revision yesterday- it felt good but I feel as if I've forgotten all I've looked at already. I know I'm not supposed to be binging games mindlessly, but honestly it's the only thing that gives me joy in my life at the moment.
It honestly scares me that the only thing I want right now is for school to start again. I remember how last year I felt tired and overworked, that all I wanted was a break, and how much I cherished that. I wanted to see my friends and I wanted to do this and that in between. Currently... I feel like I don't have any of that. There's no game I'm dying to finish, no giant art project that will take 2-3 days to fill out, I don't have any books I'm looking forward to reading, and there isn't even any pressing urgency to complete my work. The things I usually do just don't seem as fun any more.
I feel guilty that I've left the piano mostly untouched. I don't have the patience to learn a new song, and I'm sick of playing the songs I've already learnt. I never thought I'd get to the stage, because when I was learning to play my first song I thought, "this music is so beautiful, if this is the only thing I ever learn to play I'll be satisfied". I wasn't satisfied, I learnt many more tunes and though they were all songs I listened to obsessively at one stage, right now they've sort of lost their charm.
Back in the early 2000s I would play the same song on repeat. If I had a new album from my favourite artist, Jay Chou, I would play the first song on repeat, until I got sick of it. Then I'd move onto the next song. I felt that if I did that, the album would "last longer", whatever that actually meant. Then I found many more artists I liked, and I started listening to entire albums at a time. Now I have Spotify and I stream whatever the fuck I want- but I don't even know what I want any more.
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I watched a musical in Sydney with a friend of mine a couple of days ago- before any of you suggest that I might be depressed and in dire need of friendly company. I DO socialize. We watched "Only Heaven Knows", a show about gay love set in the 1940s. I had no expectations for the show; we were only there because we wanted to see a musical but that was the only one that played in the time we were in Sydney. Anyway, it was surprisingly good, but the recent history of homosexuality is downright depressing. There was a scene where "aversion therapy" was portrayed- basically a person was shocked with electrical current after displaying an image of a man, and it was supposed to cure homosexuality. I think in theory it works for house pets, you might teach the cat to stop knocking glasses off the table, but I wouldn't shock my cat even if she broke all my drinking glasses, so it's disturbing for me to think that you would choose to shock a human being.
The show reminds me of The Handmaid's Tale, they're both about how fast things can change over time, but in a bad way. The liberties we enjoy are taken for granted, and if we don't fight for them they are too easily taken away. As I write in the comfort of a warm room, sitting in front of my own laptop and looking forward to returning to my final term of higher education, I wonder if tomorrow the world would be ripped out from under my feet, and if I could lost everything in a heartbeat. That's what refugees from war-torn countries must feel like, I think. We often think that they don't need our help if they are well-dressed, if they have a smartphone in their hands; we need them to look like malnourished beggars before they are deserving of our sympathy. If this country broke out in war, however, I think I would still like to maintain some semblance of human dignity.
I've gone off on a tangent again. I must sound so very left-leaning, but I won't apologise for considering "human welfare" something that's important to me. Our world is facing troubled times, and our futures are rife with uncertainty. What I SHOULD be doing is enjoying the remainder of my break, while I have it.
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