It's a Very Dangerous Thing

To do exactly what you want.

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"Life is far too glorious to ever give it up--especially for the cursed and the damned."
Anthony Hopkins- The Wolfman.

That quote means something different to me now than it did my freshman year when I put it on this blog. I used to think it was a great statement about never giving up, especially when times get hard. I think I sympathized with the idea of being downtrodden and a loser and reveling in my own triumphant mess.

Now I think it's more of a cautionary statement about the cursed and the damned. They are what they are because they never stop striving for glory. Because they can't stop striving for glory. That's the curse of living life as a pursuit of greatness. Life becomes a trap.

(For more on the curse of glory, please see just about any song made by Kanye West mentioning fame.)

But that whole selfless-heroism thing has never done anything for me either...
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 My little sister got her SAT scores back about a week or two ago. And she soundly crushed me. She beat me by 70 points in her combined Reading and Math score.

But I'm not down about that. Know why?

Cuz #1- I'm about to graduate college anyway so my SAT score has already been completely irrelevant for about three years. I'm just gonna start deliberating lying about it.

"Hey Andy, what'd you get on the SAT?"

"Oh man, the SAT's? All I remember is the night before I got locked in the back of grocery story with some Eastern European super models. We all woke up in bathtubs full of ice and when I finally got to the test I sneezed a duck all over the answer sheet and turned that in five minutes after it started...No I don't remember what I got on my SATs! I don't need to remember things like that anymore! I remember important things like the last time I made out with someone and which beers taste like Fruity Pebbles! This is the real world, homie. School's finished!"

But the other reason, the more important reason, is that my sister received her excellent test taking skills at the cost of valuable survival instincts. All that cognitive processing power was taken from her instinctual food and waste management knowledge.

I'll give you an example.

The other day my sister yells to my mom, "Mom! There's a ton of fruit flies in my room!"

And my mom goes, "How many? Count them!"

And she responds, "...six!"

So my mom goes down to my sister's room and finds a bag of rotting food on her bedroom floor. It's got week old fig newtons, bagels, fruit, granola bars, everything. It's like my sister made plans to go hiking at three in the morning, got all the food ready, was about to bend down and pick up her bag of supplies and then all the blood rushed out of her head, she passed out with her torso half on her bed and slept for thirteen hours like that. Then she woke up and completely forgot about her plans and went about her day.

But anyway, my mom tells her to throw the rotting bag of food away to get rid of the "tons" of fruit flies and goes upstairs. My mom comes down later and sees the bag of food in the downstairs hallway, about two feet from my sister's door. And my sister is in her room on facebook. Which means, something very specific must have happened. My sister picked up the bag of nasty, opened her bedroom door, took all of ONE steps out into the hallway and said, "DONE!", put down the bag and walked back into her room.

I love my sister. She's amazing to me. Here is a person that scored in the 99th percentile in the country on critical reading ability yet she looked at a sack of rotting food surrounded by swarming flies, a universal sign of death and decay if there ever was one, and said, "hmm...if I take this bag...and it move it three feet away from my current location...AND I can no longer see it...I should be okay."

So when I brush my teeth in our bathroom that is infested with fruit flies...I'm gonna remember that test scores aren't everything. Maybe I can't remember pre-calculus level math or answer multiple choice questions about passages from short stories,

but I know what to do with rotting food and my spawn will not die from the typhoid or TB!


Happy Birthday, Leetle Seester!