The Complexity Of Life

Alton Brown teaches us that many cooking procedures involve denaturing protein strands, which are normally tightly coiled things that can be coaxed into relaxing by various means. Once these strands relax, they're much easier to work with. Life is much like this for me. Everything's so tightly coiled and difficult to understand or work with, and I'm constantly trying to understand and analyze it so it can relax into strands I can work with.

A very frustrating thing about life is the fact that I keep trying to figure out its rules and what it wants from me and it's like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube whose panels keep changing color. Social life has ridden the extremes for me. Friendship has been completely impossible, then possible to the extent where the friends I had were the greatest of all things in my life, back to impossible again, and now possible, but only with the people I'm already friends with, and even these people may decide I'm no longer worthy of their affections. Employment follows an equally maddening path. Go college and major in what you're good at and like, but then find out that what you're good at and what you like makes you only slightly more employable than a rabid rat. You must have experience to get a job, but you cannot get a job without experience, and what jobs you can get will involve skills you can't do, which will result in you being forced to leave those jobs on varying degrees of good or bad terms. You must be capable of working independently, thinking critically, and show initiative to get through college, which you will need to get a job, but when you get that job doing any of those things will make people hate you and cause them to try and get you fired. In order to win over a woman in a relationship you must be an independent fellow who knows what he wants out of life, yet at the same time be willing to become a codependent fellow willing to conform to most if not all of the things she wants out of life. The contradictions and the paradoxes compound upon one another, compelling one to wish to shout to the world, "WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT FROM ME HUH?!" Even in my deepest anger to the world, I'm still trying to understand it, but I have the feeling I'll be dead long before I get to that point.

-Frank