This afternoon I was asked how my week went - a simple, nonthreatening question - but for a panic-stricken moment I was transported into my own brain: a dusky, dusty library. While there, I began urgently rifling around in a catalog full of neatly and efficiently categorized memories. In that catalog there is a small section entitled "Short-term Memories," as I flipped hastily through the pages, small, random clippings fluttered, revealing memorable moments in the not-so-distant-past, but there, in Section 8 pages 22 through 28... nothing. Not a single jot, not a single lazily scrawled thought or roughly sketched image - a stark white blank page of un-extraordinariness...
Often I have caught myself enviously scrolling through the status updates of my friends on Facebook, jealously coveting there status-worthy lives. Given, this is not a regular occurrence. In everyone's life there will always be the mundane, trivial blurbs that no one really cares about but there are a few, privileged people who seem to live lives just made for a Facebook status; their updates are peppered with brilliant flashes of poignancy, pleasure-filled moments of joy, profound thoughts on profound experiences. Filled with dissatisfaction at the blank space after my name that is my life, I find myself walking through my life cultivating vignettes, specially crafted to dab color on an otherwise gray canvas. In part this is a helpful way to engage with the passing hours of my life, but also in part this is a sadly pathetic indicator of the tenor of my life.
... Recalled to the present, I guiltily stammered through a vaguely strung together reply. But the ugly truth stood out with the nakedness of those empty pages - I had lived a week of my life and could remember a wasteful nothing. And in my world living life means daily updating my Facebook status and living a meaningful life means being able to follow that update with 3-7 exclamation points.
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