Another day, another day, another day.

What does it take to make a life worth living? What does it take to make a day worth living? What if it’s all in vain? What if not running from your problems doesn’t solve them? What if experimentation only leads you further down the wrong path? What if you can’t course correct?

The snow today feels non-commital, a blistering squall, a momentus moment of white in a near-cloudless day, a sudden chill, drifting snow, not quite sticking, not quite being a snowstorm. It was just, passing, just, momentarily existing as a feeble shout of, yes, I am here. I am here, to be someone, to be something. We grow up, we grow old. When do we become ourselves? Is there a me that is not the amalgamation of a thousand hundred perspectives and external events and happenstance and luck and misfortune and misunderstandings and mistakes? Is there a point to typing out these sentences in the hopes that somewhere in my mind the words will reveal themselves to me, like a prompt engineer hoping that in the deep recesses of the finely tuned numbers of the stochastic parrot lie the secret answer one has been hoping for? The answer that one may not want to hear, but — . You can fill in the blanks. Autocomplete. Push and pull. Take and trade. In what way does writing generate new insight? In what way does enduring through the years of information dumping and retrieval make a better person? In what way does self-reflection improve our reflections in light of a new situation?

Now if I had friends, this is where I would insert a blurb about how I was talking to XYZ on a morning walk, or on a coffee break, or something something, like those other bloggers usually do at some point in the middle of a ranty article, in favor of a new perspective. But nah, you just have me. I suppose Amy has told me that my writing is actually engaging, which is rather interesting given that I haven’t been writing for the past year. (Or for my entire life, honestly. I suppose you can call whatever depressive, anxious cesspool of a blog I had my freshman year also writing. This is my blog now, I guess.) She’s now prepping for ICPC, not on the primary team, but still it takes a lot of skill and dedication to get where she is right now. I respect that.

I do wonder how many days I’ve wasted, how much time I’ve spent on thinking about things I really had little to no control over or little to gain from. To say everything is a learning experience is a bit of a cop-out, like if misfortune is such a great teacher, shouldn’t we be learning from the homeless, the drug addicts, the children in poverty in Africa? (it’s such a cliche, but it’s probably true.) Where are the TED talks? Where are the redemption arcs? When will the day come that every kid and adult is housed and fed and loved and not going terminally insane on the streets of NYC yelling at who knows what? Charity work should be in-vogue. Why do people not care? Why are we too caught up with our imaginary deadlines and vapid responsibilities and our systems and “people” and processes to miss out on what real problems life needs solving?

I’m part of ScottyLabs, and although we spend every week going through the motions of coming together on Saturdays for a two-hour work session, how much are we really benefitting the CMU community? I feel the answer, for most people, is close to epsilon. We don’t know, really, is the answer. How many shots does it take to land a bullseye on a target, except that you’re blindfolded and not even sure where the target is mounted? How many careers do we have to go through before we find our calling? How many tedious, tedious, brain-dead classes must we wake up for before we find what we’re really looking for? Before we find what we’re here for? Before we forget to search for the why behind it all?

Don’t tell me there’s no meaning to it all.

Don’t tell me that today was called snowfall.