Joseph Ivancic
This semester is hopefully my last at university, and it is not going down without a fight. Already it has been one of the most stressful first school weeks of my storied career. Swamped by monotonous and frustrating math work, I turn to the extensive library of old music stored on my laptop. I hope that the familiar and calming sounds will ease some of the rarer, darker emotions that have been pushed to the front of my mind. It doesn’t work, so I turned to the sure-to-fail YouTube retreat. I spend an hour laying in bed and watching other people play games. Of course it does not work, and I feel even worse for wasting that time.
I had been intending to go on one of my favorite and more dangerous bike courses in Fairfax for this assignment, but found the front tire of Freda the bicycle completely flat. After a while attempting to resurrect the flaccid rubber, I was forced to abandon my efforts. The murder investigation is underway. Later, life continued its course and I got the opportunity to bury my cat of 18 years on the family mountain. I was in the crisp evening air digging in the red clay, staining my hands and knees. There is a good feeling that comes with getting dirty.
I named this post Two Minds because of how opposing I can feel when faced with different environments and stressors. To feel happy I need to interact and laugh with friends and family, feeling the world around me in conjunction with every other thing that lives. But there are times, sometimes too many times, where I close myself off and pretend to be in a world separate from everything else. In these times I worry about math or jobs or money or clothes, instead of life and love and cold and warmth and exercise and living.